By paulgillin | September 22, 2007 - 10:54 pm - Posted in Fake News
In an essay I wrote in early 2007 about the impending collapse of major metropolitan daily newspapers, I tried to sketch out the reasons why the existing business model is unsustainable. Now, a much shorter article on Silicon Alley Insider, does a better job than I did of outlining the economic scenario. If you want to understand why major metros are screwed, look at Henry Blodget’s analysis.
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Comments Off on Numbers don't lie: why major metros are screwed
Last week I had an interesting conversation with a sales rep at the Albany-Times Union. The paper is owned by Hearst. http://www.timesunion.com/
We get the Sunday paper. That’s all we pay for. That’s all we want. That’s all we have time to read. That’s as much paper as we want to have to throw out each week.
A couple of months ago, we started getting papers Thursday through Sunday. I called and asked that they stop delivering papers we didn’t ask for. They stopped. ‘Periodically we still get them, as well as other “free” unrequested days.
Last month, the Times-Union called and offered one of the teenage kids free papers for the entire week just for the price of the Sunday paper. Our son agreed and we started getting the paper every day. “But it’s free!” he told us.
My husband started throwing the daily papers in our son’s room. After three weeks of newspapers, our son called got tired of the daily papers he never read and called the Times Union back and asked just for the Sunday paper.
They went back to delivering Thursday through Sunday.
Then last week, the Times Union called me again with the most interesting sales pitch I’ve heard so far: “But if you accept the paper every day, it would help out our paper carriers and allow them to get full benefits.”
I have no idea whether this argument was sanctioned by the Times Union or whether the sales rep was acting on his own, but either way it illustrated how desperate the paper is to get their ads in front of faces.