Newspapers as Grandpa Simpson

As everyone knows, newspapers are dying left and right. Readership is down -- way down -- and the dead-tree medium is having trouble keeping subscribers, not to mention attracting new, younger ones. As content moves to the Web, newspaper publishers (who have done a horrible job of taking advantage of the potential of the Internet), have assumed the role of grumpy old men. They sit on their rocking chair shaking their fists and saying "Back in my day ..."

The latest rant is against Google and similar content aggregators. It seems the newspaper industry is angry that these young whippersnappers are on their lawn -- er, linking to their content. In the rest of the Internet world, driving traffic from search engines is a good thing, but the grumpy old men of the newspaper industry think we should read their online news the way they want us to. "By cracky, in my day when we wanted news, we waited for the afternoon edition and went out and bought a newspaper." If you want to read Dear Abby, by golly, you have to buy the whole paper.

As blogger Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine.com writes:

Your Google snits don’t even address your far more profound problem: the vast majority of your potential audience who never come to your sites, the young people who will never read your newspapers. You all remember the quote from a college student in The New York Times a year ago, the one that has kept you up at night. Let’s say it together: “If the news is that important, it will find me.” What are you doing to take your news to her? You still expect her to come to you - to your website or to the newsstand - just because of the magnetic pull of your old brand. But she won’t, and you know it. You lost an entire generation. You lost the future of news.

Jeff has it exactly right. Newspaper publishers have had a decade or so to adapt to the new Internet-driven media environment, and they've done a horrible job.