Newspaper's biggest failure and for some reason we continue to ignore it

The biggest failure of the newspaper industry has been failing to change and adapt with its audience.

We all say that readership is down and that newspapers are dying (a moment of silence for our brothers and sisters at the Dallas Morning News) and frankly subscribers are dying (old age) and we aren't getting new ones.

At the same time we run stories about how the youth market is watching, reading and buying less traditional media (TV, newspapers and CDs) and is instead turning to new-media (YouTube, GoogleNews and iTunes), but somehow while we are writing these stories and recognizing these trends we are not actually applying the lessons to our bussiness models!

WTF?

Why am I bringing this up? Because apparently it's not as obvious as I thought it was.

And I'm getting fed of of trying to convey this fact.

The newspapers of the future are Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites. Because think about the function of a newspaper. Newspapers have always been meant to serve as a central hub of information for a community, to document, report and investigate the daily goings on and inform the people with a balance of the "want to know" and "need to know."

Where is that happening today in the desired 18-35 market today but on social networking sites?

It's not too late, we can still save newspapers, but we have to stop living in denial and embrace the change.

No one can do this better than newspapers, let's get out act together before someone else learns how.

The wake up call has been ringing for years, maybe it's time we stop hitting snooze?

I have some ideas on how to start fixing things, but I've been told I write to much, so I'll save it for a future post.

Rant over.

(And yes, this may quite possibly be one of the shortest posts on SLR ever.)