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Who exactly is killing the press
By
A friend who works at Google wanted to be sure I'd seen a new study from the Pew Internet Center* about what exactly is cutting the heart out of advertising revenues for the newspaper business. The headline on a CNET story about the study gets right to the point:
The Pew study also contains this "story of an industry's decline in one chart" graphic, showing how classified ad revenue for papers has fallen from around $20 billion a year to under $10 billion during the era of Craigslist. (And, yes, the study argues that there's a causal connection here, not just a coincidence of timing.) A ten billion dollar revenue hole says a lot about why all papers -- well run, poorly run, concentrating on local issues, concentrating on national and world affairs, up market, down market -- are in trouble, all at the same time.
To Google, it makes a difference whether the shorthand slogan in people's minds is "Craigslist is killing off newspapers" rather than "Google is doing them in." For the papers themselves, it's a fine distinction -- sort of like dinosaurs spending their last moments arguing whether it was a giant meteor strike or a bunch of volcanoes that was wiping them out. Still, a distinction worth bearing in mind for precision in blame-casting.
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* Which is run by another friend, Lee Rainie; my wife has done Pew Internet studies too.
The Pew study also contains this "story of an industry's decline in one chart" graphic, showing how classified ad revenue for papers has fallen from around $20 billion a year to under $10 billion during the era of Craigslist. (And, yes, the study argues that there's a causal connection here, not just a coincidence of timing.) A ten billion dollar revenue hole says a lot about why all papers -- well run, poorly run, concentrating on local issues, concentrating on national and world affairs, up market, down market -- are in trouble, all at the same time.
To Google, it makes a difference whether the shorthand slogan in people's minds is "Craigslist is killing off newspapers" rather than "Google is doing them in." For the papers themselves, it's a fine distinction -- sort of like dinosaurs spending their last moments arguing whether it was a giant meteor strike or a bunch of volcanoes that was wiping them out. Still, a distinction worth bearing in mind for precision in blame-casting.
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* Which is run by another friend, Lee Rainie; my wife has done Pew Internet studies too.
