Paul Farhi doesn’t blame journalism for the downfall of newspapers:
The real revelation of the Internet is not what it has done to newspaper readership – it has in fact expanded it – but how it has sapped newspapers’ economic lifeblood. The most serious erosion has occurred in classified advertising, which once made up more than 40 percent of a newspaper’s revenues and more than half its profits.
Classified advertisers didn’t desert newspapers because they disliked our political coverage or our sports sections, but because they had alternatives. Craigslist and eBay and dozens of other low-cost and no-cost classified sites began gobbling newspapers’ market share a few years ago. What they didn’t wipe out, the tanking economy did. During the first half of 2008, print classified advertising nosedived more than 25 percent, as withering job, real-estate and auto listings erased $1.8 billion in revenue from newspaper companies’ books. Newspapers have been uniquely hurt – television never had classifieds to lose.
From later in the article:
…let’s not kid ourselves. The online business model is still uncertain, at best. An online visitor isn’t as valuable to advertisers as a print customer. Online readers tend to dart in and out, spending far less time on a newspaper site than a subscriber spends with a paper. And a portion of the traffic (how much depends on the paper) comes from outside the paper’s circulation area, making these visitors irrelevant to local advertisers. I’m not really surprised that newspapers haven’t figured out how to make the Web pay for all the things that print traditionally has. There may not even be a business model for it. But again: Can you really blame the newsroom for that?
The Dish 