Commentary‘s Jon Podhoretz has a masterful new piece out in which he uses the debut of the new Newseum in Washington to relate the story of how mainstream newspapers have tried and failed to protect themselves against the advent of online competition. A key word here is ?tried? ? contrary to popular belief, newspapers haven’t ignored technological change and their leaders have often been prescient in understanding the competitive threat to their readership and advertising, especially classified. But their strategies haven’t worked, for the most part. Podhoretz isn’t sanguine about their future prospects:
Feverishly anticipating the demise of their 19th-century industrial
product, newspapers are once again renewing their efforts to take
advantage, somehow, of the growth of the Internet. But they are
uniquely ill-positioned to do so. When it comes to reporting the news,
their greatest competitive asset is the size of their news-gathering
and news-writing staffs. But they can afford those staffs only because
of advertising revenue. And, on the web, they will generate only a
fraction of the advertising revenue they have been able to generate in
print as an effective monopoly. Moreover, and unlike the case with
every other rival they have faced in the past, the technical cost of
competing with them is astonishingly low.All they will have left is a very powerful brand?the term we now use
for what used to be called a name. That brand will be worth a very
great deal, but it will not be worth enough on its own to produce the
kind of comprehensive news portrait that has been the defining purpose
of urban and regional newspapers for a century and a half. That is why,
to many observers, it seems a certainty that these brands will
eventually be bought out by Internet monoliths, like Google and Yahoo,
which are hungry for ?content.?
