Journalist Philip M. Stone has written an excellent article at followthemedia.com about how the San Francisco Chronicle and other newspapers are dealing with the “flight of classified advertising to the Internetâ€. Stone asks whether it is cuts by bean counters resulting in lighter newspapers which are leading to declining sales rather than the migration of classifieds online. He also talks about the place of advertising over editorial – a topic dear to my heart given my frustration at the desecration of the mastheads of The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald by Fairfax over the last few months.
In business schools across the world students are exhorted to build products of substance and quality in a field of dreams type way – build it and they will come. Better newspapers, delivering a valued point of difference over alternative channels, would be more successful in my view.