Thursday, February 7, 2008

The Times on the future of news

(via Romenesko)

So what's wrong with the newspaper industry? The New York Times offers their analysis today, including the sobering statistic that:

Newspaper executives and analysts say that it could take five to 10 years for the industry’s finances to stabilize and that many of the papers that survive will be smaller and will practice less ambitious journalism.

It's a good overview but misses some major factors--like bad acquisitions by newspaper's parent corporations or mismanagement (or straight-up corruption) by the same--and manages to gloss over the fact that the high-point in ad revenues they keep referencing (the year 2000) was also the height of the dot-com boom, when every IPO'd dot com was taking out lavish national ads touting their bubble-fueled companies. In fact, the dot-com boom was a statistical anomaly in advertising statistics.

PS. Not sure why there's been so much Times coverage this week. They must  be doing something right.

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