I think there will be a market for print publications for a long time to come. I also believe there will be a market for physical DVDs for years to come, just as I still believe in physical CDs. What I am arguing, however, is that we shouldn’t keep our legacy distribution mediums from allowing us to move into new mediums. We should try to maximize all possible revenue sources, not just the ones we are familiar with.

And, here is the take home point, we should not cripple new distribution mediums to product legacy ones. That is what all the industries I have describe in my post have done.

Journalists and publishers have been complaining that there isn’t enough money online, but that’s just a self-fulfilling prophesy. If you spend your days convincing yourself and others that there isn’t enough money to be made online, you certainly won’t make a lot of money online. What I am arguing for is for journalism companies to make a strong push into the online marketplace, and to make products that can stand independent of print products.

In order to make a strong push into the online marketplace, journalism companies will need to find new advertisers and new ways of advertising. It boggles my mind that people try to do the same exact advertising in a new medium. Of course it isn’t working that well! Do you advertise the same on TV as you do in print? Of course not. That would be incredibly stupid.

I have detailed before how newspapers can make money online. The strategy I outline involves going after several tiers of advertisers. One big push I’d like to see is going after small, local advertisers who have never advertised in print products before because they are too expensive. Heck we can even get the local volleyball team advertising their car wash if we price ads right.

I disagree that the issue is mimicking the experience of reading paper. Reading a paper sucks, especially a broadsheet. You get ink all over your hands (and then everything else you touch). The paper never folds back up properly. It’s too bulky to bring on public transportation. The Kindle needs two things: color E-Ink and a lower price.

But the kind of people who will read news on a Kindle aren’t the kind of people who will read newspapers in print form for years to come. Many of the people who still subscribe to print newspapers (more than just the Sunday edition) aren’t very good with technology, and it is those subscribers who are perfectly happy reading the print edition five days a week. There are two problems with catering to this crowd, however: 1) These people tend to be older, which is outside the target demographic for advertisers and 2) There isn’t a lot of growth with that age set.

We need to try to expand our audiences, not cater to an ever shrinking one.

Even if newspapers were jumping on board 100% with the internet, advertisers (their real customers) would have to be willing to jump in with equally wild abandon, and that is unlikely to happen.

And there are also plenty of consumers who still prefer to get their news in paper format. I think that will be true until we invent a digital medium that really, truly replaces the experience of reading on paper (kindle version 6 maybe?)