Why Are Newspapers Dying? - O'Reilly Broadcast: “The emergence of the Internet proved newspapers' most challenging competitor, and the one that ultimately may have managed to do the newspaper industry in altogether. Most newspapers, from the veritable New York times on down, launched their own websites, reasoning that this was simply another medium in which to publish their own writers, but this viewpoint may have been somewhat shortsighted.
In 2003, the term blog first entered into the modern lexicon, an online editorial or journal written not by professional journalists but by eager amateurs who could publish by overcoming a far smaller barrier to entry - setting up a blogging site. With contemporary tools, the blogger could effectively start producing his or her own "news" within a few hours, and if they happened to be reasonably competent, were willing to invest some time into promotion and consistent in publishing content, they had a good chance to gain more "eyeballs" than professional journalists with thirty years of experience.
As of April, 2008, only three newspapers had a subscriber base in excess of 1,000,000 readers - USA Today (2.3 million), The Wall Street Journal (2.1 million) and the New York Times (1.1 million). Most newspapers average approximately 300,000 subscribers. This of course doesn't reflect total readership numbers - many papers sell a significant proportion of their subscriber levels in newsstand and library sales - but it does provide at least a basic metric for understanding the dynamics of newspaper publishing vs. the web.”
