This week's story in the Baltimore City Paper does a great job of detailing the demise of a once-venerable local newspaper, the Baltimore Sun, but it doesn't have the depth or the space to go into why daily newspapers are in such trouble. While locally, Sun employees blame management (old management, new management), it seems clear to those of us on the Old Media Deathwatch that the problems are far deeper and more complex than just news cannibalization, The Interwebs, and poor decisions at the top. The fundamental problem, it seems to us, is one of complete and fundamental misunderstanding.

This is a misunderstanding not of business, or of reporting and journalism, or of formats and delivery, but a misunderstanding, at base, of why people read newspapers (or anything else) in the first place. For a media that depends on advertising, it seems newspapers have engaged in very little research about what people actually want; instead, they go off on their own tangents (like the Sun's pathetic attempt to reach "the kids" with the horrifying "b" free daily).

This article does the best job I've seen so far of outlining Old Media's inability to grasp the realities of a world in which the old adage "information wants to be free" has actually come to pass. Like record execs, who believe they're actually selling shiny disks in plastic boxes, the newspapers have long believed they're selling papers, magazines, web sites, or--to be charitable--"reportage". But since the dawn of the paper, what people read for is information--sure, it's better when it's well-researched and written, but essentially people just want to know what the heck is going on in the world around them, regardless of how it's packaged.

There is content; there are consumers of content; and there are advertisers who want to reach the consumers of content. It is that simple, and all the bells and whistles matter very little. The newspapers could have survived this by merging their old and new media empires, making no distinction between "web content" and "paper content", and focusing more and more on local news--leaving the AP to worry about the big stuff (which is essentially what's happened anyway, except that now local news is dead too, except for the TV stations, blogs, and community networks on the Web). The problem is, they never figured this out because they never asked. For all the paradigm-shifting rhetoric they spewed over the years, they couldn't see the forest for the trees, and their tragic death (and the news hole it leaves behind in a town like Baltimore) are the tragic result.

Labels: Baltimore, Old Media Deathwatch