85 % of newspapers will have to die? Nonsense.

John Duncan at Garcia Interactive predicts, 85 % of newspapers will be dead by 2011. This is what he says in brief: As printing and distribution costs make 50 % of full cost, a downsizing is difficult for newspapers. Online business modells will never finance the editing team as we know them now. Duncan: "The math is simple (though obviously relies on some hefty assumptions). Take Tampa, only because it’s my doorstep. The current monthly online audience of the Tampa Tribune’s TBO.com is 11.6 million. At a randomly selected rate of $10 per 1000 impressions, that means revenue of $116,000 each month or $1.4 million a year." Obviously Tampa Tribune will not finance 100 to 300 journalists with 1,4 million $. Nice, John, but wrong. This is my answer:

Thank you John Duncan for thinking for the media industry! From the core idea, you are right. A change is coming, and it will be no easy road for the media houses. But change does not equal death. Never so in business, never so in Tampa nor elsewhere. Change is constant part of economy, and businesses are in charge to cope with change. There are businesses out there, that were founded 400 years ago. Coca Cola is out there for more than 100 years, still living, but underlived a lot changes. IBM is no longer producing computers, but IBM is still doing business. Second: Your model, "math" you call it, is rubbish, as you mix a lot of key figures. I guess, you have never seen a real budget or business plan of an online venture of a newspaper. Why?

It is all about attention

One page impression does not equal 0,01 $. YOu assume one page impression is one ad impression. Wrong. It might be two, three, four ad impressions, name it... But one page impression is a certain amount of attention. Be it 10 seconds, be it one minute. Attention and time will be the future currency of the web, if we talk about ad-driven business models. Not your blog, not ebay, not google have so long experience, as a Tampa newspaper might have, in catching attention. But they have to rethink - their narrative structures, their ad-selling strategies and their core product. What attributes value to the users?

Media houses will need to rethink their jobs, they will have to refocus on their key strengths, they will have to kick out some "nice to haves", and will have to integrate new features, which people now find somewhere else. Search is at Google's, Short messages at Facebook's, selling at Amazon's. But Duncan, media houses will win back space, if they want to. And there are thousands of examples. The fact, that online business models of media houses do not finance journalism, does not proove, it is impossible, but more the fact, that there is plenty of unoccupied space left.