No news hook

So if you're one of those readers, nothing to see here. I've been saying that newspapers risk their core readership by catering to readers who are really interested in picture books. If that's you, this is all going to be text.

No surprise, this assessment of audience is not a scoop. The New York Times had it months ago. The whole industry is grappling with it.

It seems to me from outside that the Times understands that its market is changing radically. It's the number one national newspaper, but it understands that most other papers cannot aspire to that. The Times has managed the Boston Globe as a regional newspaper for New England, and I think that's the correct business decision. The Globe was the Times's major competition in the region, and it made sense to combine and segment the market.

I don't mean that this is good for journalism, but I don't see anyone talking about putting the media ownership genie back in the bottle. What's happening to newspapers happened to national banks thirty years ago - they're getting much bigger and many fewer. The cause is the same, too - less government regulation.

This is definitely worse for journalists, too. If one reporter's work is read many more places, the other reporters whose work would have been in that news hole no longer have jobs. This economy of scale also provides much more homogenized content.

What I don't understand is the newspaper industry's continued reliance on dead-tree circulation figures. Yeah, I know that's how they get paid. But they need to be talking up all the eyeballs they get on the web, because that's obviously where readers are going. They need to get paid well enough by advertisers on-line to survive. They are going to have to sell this. If they don't figure that out, since the on-line subscription model failed, we're all going to be looking at picture books.