When every newspaper was funded by and the mouthpiece for a political party, union, religious booster, ethnic group, or fraternal organization. Biases were up front and blatant.

Seriously though, 100 year old “news” articles are a hoot. It’s like the internet with better editing (usually).

One thing to remember is that virtually all news stories no matter the media that one consumes them in, originate from newspaper beat reporters. These are trained professionals who understand the objectivity and the ethics of journalism. Analysis and opinion are not necessarily constrained by these forces. My fear is that there is a Foxification of the news media, where analysis replaces objective reporting. The cable channels are not going away, but their interest in objective reporting certainly isn’t increasing.

Maybe, just maybe, projects like the iPad and other multimedia devices will save “newspapers”. If they can get the costing model right, there are potential sources of revenue there.

Also, this concept of “free” is strange. There is no “free”. When we (I am as guilty of this as anybody) consume media for no money, and the effect is that bureaus close their doors and staff is cut at newspapers – this is a huge cost. Yes, I didn’t pay any money up front to view the NY Times, but my quality of life is now effected by the lack of civic coverage.

One more thing. The dynamic of the the death of the newspaper industry will be interesting. I think it is very possible that major regional newspapers find a way to survive, possibly through a combination of factors like endowments, but smaller papers die. Hopefully these smaller markets will be able to maintain a news gathering ability, perhaps like San Diego (http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/support_us/about_us/). Also, as Egon Spengler said way back in 1984, “Print is dead.”

You don’t need huge bloated newsrooms to produce in depth news reporting and analysis. if newspaper businesses want to stay alive, they’ll have to trim the fat and get sleeker and produce more up to date information – they’ll have to compete in the marketplace like other businesses do.

But you’re right about the free thing. However, 10 years ago, a lot of people were insisting that music be free and now for the most part, people seem to readily pay for downloads.

Hey man, I am an old friend from another board, who has worked in print media and is now dealing with a career change after 10 years of a pretty successful career in print.

Anyway, I think that once the transition is pretty much complete, to digital media, there will be other ways to monetize the news beyond directly placing ads in content, and subscription pay.

The problem is that the advertisers have a gigantic hammer over the media outlets and every year the demands for product integration and editorial content for ad dollars gets more and more intense. Just look at your local news broadcast for a prime example. When I began my own media venture I was shocked by the editorial demands of advertisers, I didn’t give because my position was that, real, usable, and relevant content presented in a high quality manner was what differentiated me from my competition. Well, I didn’t survive, and my competition did. The sad thing is that I had a ton of outrageously possitive response, while all I ever heard about the competition was negative. No one read the competition, yet they whored their editorial space for their advertisers, and their advertisers were just vain enough and dumb enough to keep the ad contracts going without getting the ROI they could get other places.

Quality of content is a very difficult differentiation to win with in the media game—look at Hollywood. It is more and more about how you bring in revenue, and if the only way you can do that is through ads, your advertisers are going to, for the most part own your editorial too.

While behavioral advertising, like we see on McC, is entirely orwellian, it may be what frees news outlets in the future.

Well said Brute. The current situation with print media was created by the old guard publishers that had no real concept of how powerful the "twenty-four hour/ seven day a week" monster the internet could be. By the time that they realized what had happened, it was beyond their control and costing them the very "readers" they were trying to capture. They didn’t take the medium seriously and are now paying the price for their ignorance.

just an example of this. About 6 months ago I spoke one on one with a VP of one of the largest news publishers in the country. She thought that interactive media was essentially a trend that would die and there would always be a need for print media. She asked me if I knew anything about the advent of television and why radio didn’t die with TV…This is VP of a MAJOR publisher.

On a related note, a few months later I spoke with a media director for a fortune 500 company. I asked about their buying trends and how they are dealing with the changing environment. He told me this…"Web has always been difficult for us because our top revenue products are very heavy, and people aren’t going to go to click on an add to go to our website just so they can pay $30 for an item that costs $35 to ship."

I then asked,

“Do you see web advertising as only a means to drive web purchases?”

he answered,

“Yes.”

I’m not sure that advertisers are completely sold on the return on investment of internet advertising as a viable means of communicating with their target audience. In reality, advertisers could more easily and effectively reach their target audience on the internet. Sadly, they often choose annoying and obtrusive advertising that cause viewers (readers) to use features like ad-block and other tools to make the advertising disappear.

Two things here.

1. Everything is free on the web. This attitude will not change until incredible communication innovations like Facebook, Twitter, Google, are not free anymore. Just about every web based communication aplication is free, and it’s always been that way, mainly because it was undervalued from the start, and services felt like they had to give it away just to gain an audience.

2. Interactive advertising is a million times more effective than print. If news services only allowed behavioral and key word based advertising and sites only offered that in text ad form like what google does, they coould monetize their content while not having advertisers dictate editorial.

One could argue the lack of editorial control in mainstream print media as well.

Can’t I tune in to CNBC knowing I will get Kieth Olberman style Telegraph Avenue politics, and the next minute, go to Fox and now that I am getting News from behind the Orange Curtain? Then I can go to a Blog and discern what I get from there? Ideally I think that you would get truly unbiased news, but I don’t think that is as significant of a problem as the horrendous, and even nonexistant revenue models being used today.

So you think that newspapers do not play a vital role in the propagation of democracy in this country?