Place the blame squarely at the feet of newspaper publishers who entrenched themselves against the onslaught of the Internet. When they chose to send out their writers and reporters, The Economist noted they selected younger and cheaper talent and kept the experienced and best on the print beat.
This level of ignorance is perhaps the whole reason newspaper publishers are facing for the first time in history dramatic losses in readership. The entire planet is moving online, and these guys just don’t understand the game.
Why would anyone pull out a classifieds ad in the Newspaper, when there are resources like craig’s list and ebay?
Why would anyone want to read 3 day old news, when you can read it online in real time?
The newspapers need to fully understand what is happening to them, they must understand the gravity of the problem at hand. Their product is in decline, and they need to set themselves a strategy to shift their resources online to fix the problem.
Ad Agencies and Marketing Agencies are still pulling those ‘car sales’ and ‘k-mart’ inserts (great for the fireplace) when everyone is staring at the computer screens reading Drudgereport, or Google News.
If they spent 1/1000th of that budget online and using an effective campaign, their ROI would be multiples better.
