In case you missed it (you ungrateful non-newspaper-readers), the Financial Post and Canwest News Service ran a series this week on the future of newspapers, which unless you’ve been living under a rock recently you’ve noticed are in a bit of business trouble. But these writers know newspapers are better than those other media.
The series is in five parts:
- David Akin on the general state of the newspaper industry (which, in case you’re wondering, does talk a bit about Canwest and its debt crisis)
- Akin on how advertisers are best served by the print medium and by newspaper publishers
- Akin on the difference between Canadian and U.S. newspapers (though you could just say we’re a few years behind them on the death spiral)
- Randy Boswell on how newspapers are a trustworthy medium that other media rely on
- Kirk Lapointe with a very optimistic look at how newspapers are repositioning themselves as online destinations.
As part of the series, Canwest’s newspapers were also encouraged to write about their individual histories and connections with their communities. The Gazette got young reporter Jason Magder to do a piece on the paper’s connection with its community.
Other Canwest papers also wrote self-congratulatory pieces:
- Ottawa Citizen
- Regina Leader-Post
- Saskatoon StarPhoenix
- Calgary Herald
- Edmonton Journal
- Vancouver Sun
- Victoria Times-Colonist (which produced a podcast short audio piece with EIC Lucinda Chodan)
The National Post also asked its “opinion-makers” about their thoughts on newspapers:
- Conrad Black
- Michael Coren
- Father Raymond J. de Souza
- Robert Fulford
- Barbara Kay
- John Moore
- Noah Richler
- Marni Soupcoff
As if underscoring how far newspapers have to go, in neither of the three above cases could I find one page linking all these related stories together.
Finally, unrelated to any of the above, Stuart McLean writes in the Globe and Mail about why he loves newspapers.
I think that our newspapers need to critically toughen up on how they operate online. From seemingly zero, perhaps 95+% of all non-classified ads in print should find their way – page by page and article by article – to being mirrored online!
My problem with newspapers is that they’re often absurdly wrong about things I know about (tech) so I *don’t* trust them about stuff I don’t (pretty much everything else).
I read the newspapers are a trustworthy medium article and right in the title it says “40 per cent of all Internet traffic goes to newspaper websites”. That seemed fishy to me so I read the article and find:
“It’s interesting if you consider that 40 per cent of all Internet traffic goes to newspaper websites,” he says.
That’s it. The only reference is “Mitch Joel, an internet rock star”. Convenient that he’s a former magazine publisher who write columns in the gazette.
That’s exactly the kind of article that completely breaks my trust in newspapers. Most bloggers don’t do any fact checking whatsoever but most bloggers I actually follow regularly do. And none would put forth a stat as ridiculous as 40% of all internet traffic goes to newspapers. It doesn’t even make semantic sense let along logical. The vast majority of internet traffic is downloads, p2p sharing, torrents, streaming media, etc. Even if we just count links I’m pretty sure the 40% of links going to newspapers is pulled straight out of the guy’s ass.
The underlying truth of all this though is that you *never* believe *anything* a “digital marketing guru” says. Or an “SEO consultant” or “online branding expert” or any combination of those kind of buzzwords.