{"id":298555,"date":"2010-02-09T11:08:00","date_gmt":"2010-02-09T15:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2745923954793947308.post-3856040767709263694"},"modified":"2010-02-09T11:12:15","modified_gmt":"2010-02-09T15:12:15","slug":"song-of-the-open-newspaper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/298555","title":{"rendered":"Song of the Open Newspaper"},"content":{"rendered":"

Randall Rothenberg
President and CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau
huffingtonpost.com
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Newspapers, say the talking heads, are dying<\/strong> – chewed up for four decades by television, and finally digested during the last tenner by the Internet. Information wants to be free, the chatterers opine, and that means “the news” will evade the papers’ attempts to confine it inside a paywall. It will escape, and proliferate, becoming a slippery commodity unsupportable by either subscription fees or advertising. Requiescat in pacem, cuculli piscibus.<\/p>\n

I beg to differ. It’s not that newspapers aren’t troubled; like all consumer media, they’ve been decimated by the recession that began in 2008, which smacked advertising more severely than it did the broader economy. And even the most ink-stained among us must concede that the combination of iPhones, notebook computers, digital video, Google, blogs, Twitter, Yahoo, Gawker, and Digg has challenged the hardiest of wood-based journalism enterprises. <\/p>\n

No, my objection to the conventional wisdom is based on a more intimate economic observation: Newspapers will thrive because Walt Whitman dines at Goat Hill.<\/p>\n

I’ll explain, but not before providing some perspective. As the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, I guide an unruly, adolescent industry that’s taking a fair share of blame for undoing newspapers’ two-century long, largely unchallenged dominance of the advertising industry. As recently as 10 years ago, newspapers claimed nearly a quarter of all ad spending in the United States, ahead of broadcast television, cable TV, radio, and the infant Internet. Today, newspapers’ share of domestic advertising spend hovers around between 14 percent and 18 percent, according to the Group M and Magna media-buying agencies, with the Web due imminently to catch up. The root cause for the falloff derives from Econ 101: Because economic demand for advertising has been, through boom and bust, relatively stable for decades (at about 2 percent of GDP), ad growth in one medium tends to mean ad loss in others. Moreover, new media are creating vast new supplies of advertising inventory, pushing down prices for existing media that historically lived within reasonably secure oligopolies.<\/p>\n

But when you peer under the hood, the math isn’t as simple as all that. Newspapers remain a vital force – and maintain a strong business position – in a place where the Web-centric technorati of the Left Coast rarely look because they spend too much time in their cars and their cubicles: the community. . . READ FULL STORY<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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Randall RothenbergPresident and CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureauhuffingtonpost.comNewspapers, say the talking heads, are dying – chewed up for four decades by television, and finally digested during the last tenner by the Internet. Information wants to be free, the chatterers opine, and that means “the news” will evade the papers’ attempts to confine it inside […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4246,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-298555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298555","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4246"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=298555"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298555\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=298555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=298555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=298555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}