Sandy GholstonFox News contributor Tommy De Seno wrote an interesting blog about the plight of the print newspaper industry. As the writer points out, a number of people are of the belief that a key component of the struggles of the print newspaper industry has been putting content on the Web for free while still trying to sell the printed product in coin boxes and through subscriptions. On the surface, it makes sense. De Seno makes another interesting point, later in the article, that the success of a newspaper he wrote for is built on a foundation of ditching the old-school image of newspaper reporters as these objective beacons of integrity and letting them give opinion and allowing readers to make the decision (the Fox News model). Unfortunately, as is the case with Fox News, the model fails if there is not a balanced view of issues. Fox News is rarely balanced in its presentation particularly on its evening shows like The O’Reilly Factor, Hannity and Colmes (in spite of how much they pretend they regularly give no balance to “analysts” like Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, Ann Coulter, Dick Morris, Bernie Goldberg and others) and On The Record.I am clearly in favor of opinion, but with both sides equally presented, and this is where Fox News fails most often and most notably. But, on the other hand, I think Fox News has contributed to the tabloidization of news and I think that is the reason for its success. It has turned the news into A Current Affair or Inside Edition- the old-school tabloid television shows. In this respect, Fox News has been brilliant and that is part of the reason for its success: Constant hard-hitting opinion (that blurs the line between news and opinion), a right-wing lean, tabloid stories of missing women and children, adults having sex with kids, scandals involving stars, etc. Newspapers could, to some extent, learn from the successful Fox News model. And, to be honest, so could some of the other cable networks. I think MSNBC is getting the picture, but CNN needs to bring back shows like Crossfire (a program that Fox News stole the template from when it created Hannity and Colmes).
Fox News:
http://foxforum.blogs.foxnews.com/2008/12/30/deseno_tricitynews/
I read about TriCity News’ success on the Marketing Doctor’s blog, who pointed out that TriCityNews is doing a good job of reaching their Local target market (advertisers, especially). I read about the unique format afterward..
It would be interesting to hear if there are any other newspapers out their following just one of these two strategies in order to be able to better parse out to which of these two the paper’s success might be most attributable to.
Here’s John Tantillo’s full post on his blog.
I actually think smaller newspapers will probably be OK. They tend not to spread their resources to thin by hiring too many people and they tend to pay sometimes obscenely-low wages to workers. Low overhead and lack of competition from bigger newspapers could make smaller newspapers better equipped to ride out the storm while their bigger brothers suffer. But, newspapers need to learn how to adapt to the technology and the immediacy that people like while striking a balance with profitability.