The business of news

I’m often asked: How’s the newspaper doing?

My stock answer for the last dozen years has been that it’s a challenging time, but an exciting time.

Challenging because, in this digital age, the print business model has been disrupted.

Exciting because those currently working in print journalism must, for the first time ever, reinvent the product. Think about that. We’ve been putting ink on paper for 250 years and it’s worked … really well. The print industry weathered the advent of radio and then television, both of which were deemed to be the death of newspapers. It didn’t happen.

But things are different in the digital realm. Over the last 15 years, more than 1,400 cities and towns across the U.S. have lost their community newspapers, abandoned by readers and advertisers who have moved online. They’re called news deserts — locales where the local daily or weekly newspaper no longer exists.

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