All you really need to know about why newspapers are in trouble


Forget pay walls, micropayments, free content, secular or cyclical advertising, antiquated business models and practices, the Internet, print-centric thinking or any other of the seemingly endless list of factors adversely affecting newspapers.

You can understand the predicament of newspapers in the two short sentences below. It’s all you need to know to know why newspapers are struggling, why some of them tettering on the brink of bankruptcy, why their stock prices are depressed, why they laid-off 15,000-plus last year.

“The safer you play your plans for the future, the riskier it actually is. That’s because the world is certainly, definitely and more than possibly changing.”

Seth Godin, in Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us