Duncan Rilley had an interesting piece Monday on that venerable topic, the future of newspapers:
We accept as a norm that newspapers cover a wide range of news. Everything from local, national and international news, sport, finance, celebrity news and gossip, and even offer comics and crosswords. The economies of scale created publications that had something for everyone, and it has worked well for a long time. But it doesn’t today. The internet has driven specialization, and advertising that efficiently targets customers. What if the answer to saving some newspapers was to use their diminishing resources to be the masters of specialized content, instead of going wide, and mastering nothing at all.
Former journalist Philip Meyer, currently the Knight Chair in Journalism at the University of North Carolina and author of the 2005 book “The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age” thinks that specialization may save some newspapers.
This idea makes a lot of sense to me, as a consumer, because I never read a newspaper cover to cover anymore. I subscribe to hundreds of feeds and I surf my bookmarks. A newspaper that just gave me political and business news might work for me. I hate all that lifestyle crap they stuff into papers. But I’m not convinced that the economic model is there for specialised newspapers, not least because a blogger can do specialisation much better than any newspaper.
