news-record.com

Almost every day, I hear from people who tell me why newspapers are losing circulation. They cite:

* We're too liberal or too conservative.

* We've got too little local news or not enough national news.

* We're in bed with the power structure or antagonistic to the power structure.

* We're moving too slowly or too quickly away from the way things have always been done.

While all those things have probably contributed in minor ways, they aren't really it.

Steve Smith, one of the more progressive editors in the country until he resigned his position in Spokane last year, posted a speech he gave that addresses what's happened in the newspaper business. While I don't agree with everything he says, he describes the causes of circulation losses clearly and, I believe, accurately.

It isn’t about content, mostly — research tells us that. The social and technological forces simply proved insurmountable.

Still, we can argue that industry leaders in both print and broadcast failed to understand or embrace new business models or that their experiments were the wrong experiments at the wrong time. But they were not blind to their changing circumstances.

At the turn of this century, at the dawn of the decade, the steady, progressive loss of print readership and circulation began to accelerate, driven now by the digital explosion and the proliferation of competitors. Some, such as Craigslist, struck at the heart of the legacy media advertising base. Information aggregators who, let’s be honest, steal the work of others and distribute it without paying for its creation, contributed to the devaluation of news and information, creating the digital-era myth that information is free.

Meanwhile, the growth of cable and satellite TV, channel proliferation and market fragmentation, competition from PCs and video games…all of that contributed to accelerating declines in the audience for traditional TV news.

Simultaneously, changes in the marketplace began to erode, at a pace far faster than expected, the financial foundations of traditional news organizations, particularly newspapers.

Changing buyer habits have all but destroyed the department store culture that was the bedrock of a newspaper’s revenue stream. Discount chains such as Wal-Mart and Costco are now the retail leaders. And these chains have foresworn traditional print advertising in favor of direct mail and word of mouth (Costco) and cheap inserts and television (Wal-Mart).

He proceeds to talk about journalism's future, its challenges and opportunities. It's a long read, but it moves quickly. And most of it can apply to Greensboro.