signor_john - 12:51 am on Apr 4, 2009 (gmt 0)

To a great extent, newspapers have brought on their own problems by cheapening the quality of their products and their audiences. Consider:

- Many (most?) newspapers these days try to build "community" on their Web site with blog comments or reader forums. Advertisers don't want to pay full retail to be on pages of flame wars between Democrats and Republicans, "right to life" and "right to choose" advocates, or Yankees and Red Sox fans. The more a newspaper site becomes a social-networking site, the less value it has to advertisers who are willing to pay decent CPMs.

- In the metropolitan area of 2.5 million where I live, nearly all of the world and national news consists of recycled NY Times and Washington Post stories, and the editor recently announced that the paper would save its best content (investigative reporting, features, etc.) for the print edition. The print edition already sucks, and the Web edition (which has a lot more competition than the print edition does) is about to suck even more. It's almost as if Dr. Kevorkian had been hired as an editorial consultant.