Comments on: The problem facing the news business is fundamentally a revenue problem: Pew report

By: what will replace newspapers? « RickMcCharles.com

what will replace newspapers? « RickMcCharles.com — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 06:09:36 +0000

[...] Papers funded their news rooms with revenue from classified ads? [...]

By: Julie Starr

Julie Starr — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 00:59:59 +0000

You’re right, that’s a stand-out quote. Part of the reason newspapers are off-balance is because it’s hard to see this stuff clearly when you’re inside a newsroom peddling furiously to get the paper out each day. Part of it’s complacency bordering on arrogance. Part of it is no one in the business has previously seen anything move at the speed of the internet. Part of it is lots of key people in the business barely used the internet until recently, some of them still probably don’t.

By: Mark Webster

Mark Webster — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 23:44:02 +0000

The cogent passage is “In newspapers, roughly half of all classified advertising revenue has vanished, a good deal of that to operations that newspapers could have developed for themselves.”
What surprises me is how clear and well-telegraphed the information has been and for so long, yet newspapers are still acting off-balance.