Some time within the next year an amazing event will occur which you need to be on the look-out for. (I first ran with this 1911 Leslie-Judge cartoon back in 2005, at MooresLore.)
A major city’s "monopoly" newspaper will shut down. Just shutter. Go dark. Disappear. Leaving that city with (it will think) nothing.
Why? Oil. The cost of oil, and of producing manufactured goods based on energy (paper, ink, etc.) will be the last straw for many papers. Already the biggest chains are, it seems, on their last legs. McClatchy, Gannett, The New York Times — the smart ones (and Scripps was a smart one) diversified out long ago.
Think about it. A newspaper’s subscription rate is designed to just pay the cost of delivery, of getting the product to you. Note that most papers long ago ditched kids-on-bicycles in favor of "more efficient" men in cars. Big, old cars. Station wagons, a lot of them. You can’t go to a mini when you’re tossing 500 newspapers each morning. The numbers don’t work.
Or consider ad space. What the Web didn’t eat other competitors chewed up. The big department store ads are gone. The auto dealers are gone. Real estate, gone. The legal ads can go into a specialty legal paper, the entertainment ads into a specialty weekly as well.
It’s a spiraling in, as with an airplane that has been hit by a bomb. The paper gets smaller, editorial jobs are cut, it’s less interesting, so more jobs are cut and very soon there is nothing left.
The "news business" will eulogize this as Armageddon, but it’s not.
It’s an opportunity.
The way is now clear for a more general-purpose Web site which combines data on every home and business with neighborhood news coverage paid for on a contingency basis, the way ZDNet pays for blogs.- Entertainment weeklies, legal weeklies, and even sports weeklies have grabbed up the niche of covering details on these areas. We don’t need what the paper claims to offer any more.
- Neighborhood weeklies have taken up the local news coverage banner that the city weeklies dropped long ago. Nearly every neighborhood in Atlanta has a weekly, some areas two or three. Most are surviving, if not thriving.
- Most people get their news from TV and radio anyway.
Now the "journalism" community will bemoan the fact that we’ll miss their editorial insights, their political coverage, and their leadership role. They flatter themselves. Few people care about anything but the comics any more — that’s the only reason I get my fishwrap. (What’s your excuse?)
But the main point today is that nature abhors a vacuum. This is the greatest period of opportunity you will ever see for local, online news resources. Its like will not come along again. Once the niche is filled it will stay filled, buying-out smaller competitors as they emerge. The business model is now clear — pay writers by the page view, sell ads next to compatible content, make sure there’s enough revenue to pay for the page views (seeding in national ads from Google, Microsoft and elsewhere) as needed. Easy-peasy.
One more piece of advice. If you’re thinking of following my example of 30 years ago and going to journalism school, forget it. Go to business school instead. Create journalism. Be a publisher.
Leave the hacking to people who don’t know any better, like me.
