http://www.lostremote.com/2007/02/06/worlds-oldest-newspaper-goes-digital/

and if san francisco is a web-savvy market, it is a backwater in comparison to sweden.

but, the irony of posting this immediately after the “you can’t skip my print ad” post shouldn’t escape anyone.

this is the deal: the economics of the newspaper are still working. they may not be working at the rate of returns and growth that a bubbly stock market may like, but the rate of returns and the gross revenue of the print world are still fat and happy enough to make newspaper ownership very attractive to many. while things are changing, they aren’t changing so fast that we need to stop the presses tomorrow.

the genie is out of the bottle on classifieds, and it won’t be coming back. newspapers held a monopoly on that kind of advertising forever, and were able to charge premium rates to deliver those messages. newspapers now have to figure out new business models to recover that lost revenue. will those be online-only? maybe, maybe not.

what we are hearing, time and again, as we look at niche web sites that are focusing on hyper local is that as soon as they hit a common point in their growth, they use their sites as a springboard to start publishing tabs or giveaways. why? because the local advertisers still see more value in print ads than they do in online. the editors and the readers may be getting the whole online gig, but the advertisers - particularly privately owned small businesses - still get the most customer satisfaction from seeing their display ad on a printed page. maybe it is mental accounting, but it is what it is.

the big puzzle online lies in fragmentation of the audience with infinite choice, and education of the local marketplace to find best fits to market their messages in media that ultimately result in their selling product. national advertising has already undergone their major shift and they have massive marketing mojo who are figuring out their new media mix. the more advertising fragments, the harder it becomes for consumers get informed, which is where opportunities to aggregate fragmented online advertising start to appear.

newspapers have to come to terms that their bread and butter is married to mom-and-pop stores on main street. and it should be noted that the last few years have not been easy on mom-and-pops either in terms of costs of doing business and increased competition in a climate that favors big business over independent business. they have to figure it out together, or they will perish together.

If a newspaper doesn’t change it’s mission statement to combat the internet, it’ll shut down eventually. But I think that with creativy, you can probably create good enough content on ANY platform, even print. Poll your consumer base. If they want paragraph-long stories, give them paragraph-long stories. If they want a newspaper that they can read for long, in-depth pieces, give them that.

I don’t ever read the paper anymore, but there will ALWAYS be a large chunk of the population who can’t figure out the internet, much in the same way I cannot figure out algebra. You can’t punish THEM, but you need to adapt to expand beyond a small, core audience. (Unless you want hyper-local, like community newspapers. Then more power to you.)