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Newspaper cabal ‘colludes’ ten years too late

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Apr 6, 2009 

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Edward Barrera  |

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Newspaper cabal ‘colludes’ ten years too late

ADOTAS — It pains me to watch newspaper publishers flail at ghosts of Christmas past: Craigslist, classified advertising and inbound links.

The Newspaper Association of America will be having its annual meeting this week, and I wish I could see anything they decide that will change the spiral of the newspaper business. But I can’t. According to Alan Mutter, they will be talking about:

- How to recover some of the classified advertising business that has been usurped by Craig’s List and others.

- Whether to demand payment from aggregators who now freely link to content from their sites.

- How newspapers might get a greater share of the $10.8 billion in search revenues that represented 46 percent of all U.S. online advertising revenues in 2008.

Apparently, they won’t be doing this publicly, something about collusion ramifications, so they’ll be doing this the old fashion way – in backroom, secretive conversations. But maybe what they should be doing is rethinking the strategy of online period. It’s the old saw about the railroad business thinking it was in the railroad business as opposed to the transportation business.

The premise being that air travel would eradicate need for railroads. Well, that has happened. It might be a weak analogy (and not a longterm fix) but it certainly seems better than giving away content for free.  Maybe the newspaper business should focus on the newspaper business. Charge for online content, force anyone who wants to link to their stories to pay and stop Google from using their content in search unless it pays as well.

Radical, absolutely. Will it continue the spiral, quite possible. But remember, most newspapers make a profit. Unfortunately, their parent companies have been so debt laden that they have been gutting newspapers to keep maximize profits. It might already be too late, but these are desperate times.

– Express your opinion, comment below.

Tags: alan-mutter, finance, internet-advertising, Newspaper-Association-of-America, newspapers and online-advertising

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