Tt proposed post oct 20, 2016

for this thread:
http://toledotalk.com/cgi-bin/tt.pl/article/207105/20Oct2016/Plummeting_Newspaper_Revenue

unfinished and may not post it.

Oct 17, 2016 - Politico - What If the Newspaper Industry Made a Colossal Mistake?

What if, in the mad dash two decades ago to repurpose and extend editorial content onto the Web, editors and publishers made a colossal business blunder that wasted hundreds of millions of dollars?

What if the industry should have stuck with its strengths—the print editions where the vast majority of their readers still reside and where the overwhelming majority of advertising and subscription revenue come from—instead of chasing the online chimera?

That’s the contrarian conclusion I drew from a new paper written by H. Iris Chyi and Ori Tenenboim of the University of Texas and published this summer in Journalism Practice.

Buttressed by copious mounds of data and a rigorous, sustained argument, the paper cracks open the watchworks of the newspaper industry to make a convincing case that the tech-heavy Web strategy pursued by most papers has been a bust.

The key to the newspaper future might reside in its past and not in smartphones, iPads and VR. “Digital first,” the authors claim, has been a losing proposition for most newspapers.

Maybe what's needed is the Slow News Movement. No rush for media orgs to publish crap every 10 seconds and no rush by consumers to read every scrap of crap.

I think that an information overload point will be reached for many consumers who will then embrace the Slow News Movement by forgoing all of the alleged "breaking" news stories and all of the must-know-it-all-now consumption methods.

These future reformed information consumers will resort to a morning or evening "paper" for news and that's it. After reading the print or digital newspaper at scheduled times as part of the daily routine, the Slow News Movement crowd would have about 23 hours left in the day for living.

A few media orgs are sustaining their text-heavy operations by charging a fee (subscriptions) for their products, like many businesses do.

Unless someone is buying, I pay for my beverage when I patronize a coffee shop. But for some reason, the newspaper industry decided to give away its craft for free on the web. Good one.

Quality writing, a paywall, the Slow News Movement (scheduled digital publishing times), print editions, clean and simple web and app design for comfortable screen reading, these things might help media orgs survive today.

I'm not paying money for a digital subscription if the newspaper's website is a bloated, piece of shit. At the moment, I cannot think of a single newspaper website that is not a wretched hot mess.

Sep 10, 2016 - Politico - Why Print News Still Rules

http://digiday.com/publishers/breaking-news-commodity-times-adjusts-digital-news-metabolism

http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/03/the-uks-times-and-sunday-times-are-structuring-their-new-apps-and-website-around-peak-traffic-times/

http://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2016/07/28/times-editor-john-witherow-how-its-paywall-paying-and-why-he-thinks-guardian-will