Newspapers of the World, Unite: Carr

(NEWSER) - In the avalanche of reporting and commentary on the collapse of the newspaper business, a number of salient, none-too-flattering facts have been overlooked about how newspapers contributed to their own demise, Bill Wyman writes on Splice. First, there's the misunderstanding that readers pay for news. It's advertisers who pay, and in the boom years, rich profits from that advertising were devoted to pleasing Wall Street, not preparing for inevitable threats to the papers' monopoly in delivering those ads. More»

(NEWSER) - Rumors of the New York Times’ demise are greatly exaggerated, reports... the New York Times. “Despite some published alarms to the contrary, the company has positioned itself to ride out another year of recession, maybe two,” Richard Péréz-Peña writes in a review of his employer’s finances. The Times hopes to "fill the void" left as other papers fold or cut back, a so-called last-man-standing strategy. More»

Disgruntled staffers told few have ventured behind paywall

(NEWSER) - Three months after Newsday erected a paywall around its revamped $4 million web site, only 35 people have paid the $5 a week needed to breach it. Publisher Terry Jiminez revealed the figure at a heated newsroom meeting last week, insiders tell the New York Observer . Jiminez stressed that most visitors already had free access to the site via either their newspaper or their cable subscriptions, adding: "That's 35 more than I thought it would have been." More»

Hit by losses, media company discontinues Guardian America

(NEWSER) - Guardian News and Media, which lost $60.3 million last year, is shutting its US-centered website Guardian America after two years. The site will now redirect to the Guardian newspaper's American coverage. Guardian America's head will instead focus on international expansion for guardian.co.uk. "We took it down because it was confusing and few people landed there," said one exec. "The change is meant to be more user friendly to our American audience." More»

(NEWSER) - Newspapers are doomed, and if they’re looking for someone to blame, they should start with themselves, writes Bill Wyman for Splice in the second part of his industry critique. The "garrulous" Luddites working at newspapers—from managers to reporters—never considered the implications of technology. “They were out of their depth, lazy, and arrogant,” accustomed to having a monopoly on information. Accordingly, their web products are terrible, with little thought given to user experience. More»