Newspapers are dying because it's expensive to produce content, there's serious downward pricing pressure on advertising, and they've had a really hard time getting their traditional small print advertisers to buy online ads. It's not even a given that an equilibrium price in online ads is enough to pay for content. Assuming a given article gets a $10/cpm and costs $100 to produce, they need 10,000 impressions to break even. It's crazy.
These things lead directly to the quality issues you're seeing. It's difficult to justify high end online content presentation when you can hardly afford to keep writers around. How many newspapers can really compete for engineering talent when there are sexier, better paying jobs at not-a-newspaper, inc?
These things lead directly to the quality issues you're seeing. It's difficult to justify high end online content presentation when you can hardly afford to keep writers around. How many newspapers can really compete for engineering talent when there are sexier, better paying jobs at not-a-newspaper, inc?