NEWSPAPERS — an interesting email from reader Ed Brenegar.

My son recently interviewed for a job with a newspaper that is a part of one of the large chains. What he learned from the interview, which lasted 80 minutes with both the Executive and Managing Editors, points to a divide that I think is worth noting.

This paper produces a wide variety of niche products. The figure that they reach about 80% of their region with one of their products. The products are focused on parenting, retirees, entertainment, etc, as well as online and print versions of the daily paper. They are making money.

One of the explanations for the demise of the print edition of the traditional newspaper that they gave him was the change in the demographics of the community. They told him that increasingly people move there, spend a few years, and move elsewhere. They don’t move into town and take up an intimate concern for the community. They find that the percentage of the local population that is engaged in local issues is shrinking, and therefore the numbers of people who are interested in a newspaper is shrinking. As a result, the problems of local newspapers are the connected to the problems of local communities. May explain why the quality of people who run for local public office is so poor.

My guess is that many of these old traditional newspaper companies don’t have the resources nor the capacity to shift to a multi-product format. Hence, they are tied to the past, and the past is passing away. Of course, nature abhors a vacuum, and it will be filled by some form of information retrieval system.

Thought you’d find this interesting.

I do.

UPDATE: A newspaper-biz reader who requests anonymity emails:

In our division every one of the print magazine businesses have lost huge amounts of money in the last two years. As in 40%-50% drops in revenue. However, everyone of our internet businesses has grown and continue to grow at 15%-50% depending on the specific market, but they all grow. Having worked on both the print side and internet side I can tell the biggest reason for the decline of the print side is advertising. Specifically, print magazines are finding it hard to attract advertisers. While it is tempting to blame the decline on the increasing political editorials that sometime masquerade as “news” that is usually a side effect rather than a cause–the editorials get more pages because there are fewer ads to fill those pages.

And here is why–distribution. Internet venues exposes a person’s ad to a far greater scale than any newspaper can hope to achieve. We have one business that has a print magazine and an internet version. Almost to a customer when we discuss a marketing campaign or advertisement the prospective businesses are only interested in the internet version–we often have to throw in a free quarter page in the mag to sweeten the pot. Why? Because the mag is distributed to a few hundred thousand people if we are lucky–the internet portal exposes the ad to a few hundred thousand people the first day–and a few million people across the country by the end of the day.

From the internet side we’ve developed several standards for various websites to distribute advertisement information to several distribution nodes. Want to sell a pleasure boat or a motorcycle? Place your ad on one of portals and it will get distributed to not only our websites but to Google, Yahoo, and up to 50+ other websites that sell boats or motorcycles. We’ll even place it on eBay or Craigslist for you. Hell, craigslist has been almost the single cause of the demise of newspaper classified ads.

Has the newspaper industry EVER thought to develop a way to exchange ad information with another newspaper across the country? No. They believe in keeping it close–why give the other guy a chance to show your ad and get credit? That’s why they are dying–they don’t understand that if they had developed such standards and developed their agreements properly they could reap a 2% jump in advertisement revenue for every 1% they lost. It’s all about exposure. If they want to blame “the local demographics changing” I suppose that might be true–but it has nothing to do with why they are losing revenue.

Interesting.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Richard Posner asks: Are newspapers doomed? Gary Becker says yes, they are.