Let’s take a look at the [insert state here] Newspaper Press Association website for a moment, shall we?

Let’s scan the headlines:

Hmm. Nothing about online presence here.
Let’s go down to the archives…

(Nothing on home page. Must dig deeper in to the archives to discover anything about this mysterious “world-wide internets” everyone seems to be talking about…”)

Ah, finally:

“ACU student newspaper unleashes iPad edition” (April 9, 2010)
“Tynt.com: an idea that’s been lighting up audiences” (not dated, May 2010 edition)

Two headlines. Two headlines about newspapers and the internet. Two. No more, no less. Since May, 2010, those are the only two headlines that have anything to do with [insert state here] newspapers.

Now, let’s take a look at the [insert country here] Newspaper Press Association”

“Where is online advertising most powerful?”
“Financial Times’ experiment with paywalled blogs”
“Print circulation does not correlate with ability to generate Web revenues”
“Newspapers unveil auction site, Boocoo.com”
“Print readers get first crack at city pay stories”
“New York Times is top online newspaper site for May”

All of this I can easily locate with a click of two or three links off of their front page.

Better, but still not much.

And these press associations want us to believe that it’s getting BETTER for newspapers? That online advertising revenue is steadily climbing? That we’re going to beat Google at the game it invented? That our target audience is retired adults who have one foot in the grave and we’ll have to cancel their subscription within the next 6 months?

Newspapers that won’t embrace the future of publishing with the internet? Publishers that are so old and stodgy that they refuse to believe that future generations won’t be reading their dead-tree editions? Publishers that are so ingrained in their set ways that they don’t know how to grasp the idea of the internet? That they’re afraid of readers talking back to them (comments) and they won’t know how to respond without their holy grail of toilet paper (the closest facsimile to newsprint that you can get)? That it might cut into the sales of their dead-tree edition (even though online sales DO count as circulation numbers, they’re just VIRTUAL)?

To make matters even worse, the newspaper I work for just received this past year’s accolades for killing trees; we won a bunch of awards, and even the “Golden Shitter” of them all when all the points were added up. Heck, even for the token “website” bone they throw out, we won something.

And then they compiled it all into a future stack of kindling we in the industry call a “tab.”

There were pages dedicated to news stories.
There were pages dedicated to opinion columns.
To advertising.
To special sections.
To news photos.
To sports photos.
To feature photos.

There were pages dedicated to headlines.

Headlines, for Christ sakes. A page for headlines.

And nowhere, not throughout the entire publication, was there a single mention of website.

Not a single mention.

We, as newspapers, should be proud of ourselves as a collective. We have completely ignored this whole “interwebs” thing in favor of something we wrap our dead fish in, or simply dispose of in our recycling bins.

Newspapers: No goddamn wonder you’re losing the battle.

Good riddance.

“Now that the economy has improved, they [advertisers] see no reason to rush back to newspapers, where ad prices are high and audience response ordinarily cannot be quantified as easily as it can on Google Analytics (which also happens to be free).

“By not keeping pace with the turnaround, newspapers will continue to lose ground they can ill afford to lose…

“Half or more of the circulation at most newspapers is composed of individuals who are aged 50 and older. This concentration means that newspapers on average have twice as many senior readers as exist in the population as a whole – and that, by logical extension, they are not engaging the younger readers that they must attract for a prosperous future.”

Via Newsosaur.

Another view on why magazines won’t work on tablets without some out-of-the-box thinking