grizatwork said:
The decline is more about platform delivery than the reporting. Advertising moved to online platforms. People actually getting a paper delivered to their house declined. Why would you get a paper delivered when you read the news last night via a notification to your cell phone. I still get the GF Tribune delivered to my house. It is a USA Today paper printed in Helena now. The news deadline is around 4pm. There is no Saturday paper. I have to go online to get that. Even so, Saturday night sports doesn’t get reported until Monday. Their building sold and being converted into a church. These are decisions made by finances due to the internet, not by content. In my opinion.
This is all correct. Newspapers for more than a century made money first from Classified ads (who buys or reads those anymore?), then from subscriptions. The Missoulian subscription base is a tiny fraction of what it was when I worked there as a college kid 15+ years ago.
As someone who sells advertising for a living now, newspapers are nowhere on the radar in terms of competition. Advertisers in Montana (and everywhere) are interested in digital, radio, podcasts, social media, on demand video, streaming, live television, niche print like quarterly magazines....and then somewhere at the very bottom of the totem poll is news print.
The saddest part of this is that is has literally nothing to do with almost all the content producers. Sure, some newspapers and newspaper reporters have vendettas and axes to grind. But the media entity itself is struggling to make any sort of revenue from previously lucrative streams and is dying on the vine.
It makes me so sad. I love what we've been able to create at Skyline Sports & ESPN MT and I feel so blessed to live in my home state continuing to practice crafts I have a deep passion for. But all I ever wanted when I was a kid and a teenager was to be a newspaper man. And those dreams died when I was 25 years old. At least we were able to see this coming a decade ago...I can't imagine being a young, ambitious journalist working at a newspaper these days. It would be beyond depressing.