Are readers fleeing newspapers? Originally the business model for a newspapers was built on a printed page which held an almost monopoly over the local area in many instances and for the national market over huge areas of the UK.
If a business wanted to reach a particular customer base it had no option but to appear to the entire paper audience forcing the advertising in a run of paper campaign be it sports, business, politics, government - they were the one authoritative source of that information. Some specific targeting of audiences was possible eventually by supplements and magazines, however the main defining factor which cut into that monopoly was radio and television, but not by a huge amount. Now, a user who is looking for information about sport can find a web site that focuses on that sport in ways a general interest newspaper cannot and daily (or minute by minute) to boot, this applies to a person interested in politics, business or something as random as daily updated matchstick eiffel tower model enthusiasts….
However then the Internet came along and completely blew about that near monopoly. Now there are literally hundreds of thousands of publications/websites competing for the advertising £. No single site can claim the size and loyalty of the audience as a print paper, but once again a number of small websites combined can really cut into the print revenue.
Currently however a lot of the online sites are piggy backing off the back of the newspaper content and syndicating this information as their own, what happens when the margins become so close on the newspaper product that they can no longer afford to employ the 1,000’s of people of they currently do and have to close, do they get rid of the journalists…..?.
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