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Jan
Newspapers – Past, Present, & Future
Paul Steiger, managing editor of the Wall Street Journal for the last 16 years until tomorrow, wrote an excellent piece entitled Read All About It: How Newspapers Got Into Such a Fix, And Where They Go From Here. This is a lengthy article but well worth the read. Also, it appears to be a free article from the WSJ, even for non-subscribers.
It was the fall of 1999, and the newspaper I edited, The Wall Street Journal, was awash in money. Thanks to the dot-com boom and the lush advertising it generated, we were running the presses at full tilt nearly every day, yet had to turn away ads for lack of space.
Even as the good times rolled, two non-newspaper names kept coming up. I recall being stunned to learn that the main place where our own readers checked stock prices was the finance section of Yahoo. A couple of kids from Stanford had launched a search engine called Google. Already, many of my colleagues were using it.
Less than six months later, the tech bubble began to deflate. Hundreds of dot-coms died, taking with them their ad budgets. But the Web industry pushed forward, and within a few years it shredded newspaper business models that had held sway for decades.
