The Jeff Beckham Weblog

Over on his Long Tail blog, Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson takes a more optimistic view of the financial situation the newspaper industry finds itself in. The recent news that advertising revenue had taken its biggest drop in 50 years set off the latest round of doom-sayers calling for the end of the newspaper era.

There’s no doubt that newspapers find themselves in increasingly tight times - in addition to advertising revenue, readership of the print version is also down in several areas. But as Anderson points out, the current drop in revenue still leaves the industry “just ten percent off its historic highs (much like the stock market) and is still twice as big as it was twenty years ago.”

Newspapers are still at $45 billion business, but to remain that way, there are clear strategic changes that have to take place:

• Moving from the producing-a-product mindset to an offering-a-service mindset
• Embracing the web and not just pushing print stories online
• Hyperlocal stories that focus on neighborhoods
• Applying a voice and a viewpoint to the stories of the day, rather than reprinting wire service stories