Mar 7, 2009

Back to the future

The news of MediaNews Group's "I-News" inspired an anonymous commenter to dredge up an old and mostly forgotten newspaper experiment. It's rich:
Here's a must-watch newspaper 1981 experiment on YouTube that lasted about as long as Singleton's printer will: http://tinyurl.com/dn4avh

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

What an excellent clip. I didn't realize that this went that far back...I would have guessed 5 years later. Just like the editor said then, we won't make much money, bank on deano not getting out of the gate on this, losing money, and continuing to see his competition like yahoo take what was left of recruitment advertising. As a matter of fact, economic issues aside, I believe the yahoo deal for newspapers has killed them.If you ask people who try and place an ad through the medianews web sites, they start laughing. I didn't know why until I tried to place one through lang. Unreal!

Anonymous said...

over/under till lang folds the Daily News print edition is 120 days.

Anonymous said...

20 cent street edition! Those were the days.

Anonymous said...

fiscal year end at end of june, they arent that smart to figure out the daily news is dead paper printed. they will make some other stupid changes in advertising etc and try to pass blame on some helpless minion. boy, ed moss has a track record that is amazing and all bad. who has he brought in, how have they performed, what has he done to inspire leadership, etc. newspaper next, ad impact program reun by a dolt, magazines that hit the ground losing money etc. when will it ever end? you 120 days is doable, however, i wager on over.

Anonymous said...

daily is not going to fold.

Anonymous said...

the daily news is outsourcing its print edition, not ceasing to print.

Anonymous said...

lang is losing approx 5-6 million each month vs last year which wasn't pretty either. daily news circ dwindles, advertising has disappeared, not much left on expense, killing print or reducing some number of days is not all that unlikely. my guess is that they will have a mandated number of pages with an ad to edit ratio that is much tighter than today. you may get your paper seven days but there won't be much in it, not that there is now, but, it will be much less.

Anonymous said...

Yeah I remember when people said the Her-Ex was not going to fold. It can happen to the DN.

Anonymous said...

Only issue is the legal advertising.

Anonymous said...

The only lang newspaper that has any legal advertising to speak of is the san gabe papers. That will disappear soon enough just because it is now a waste of tax dollars. It does not accomplish what is was originally intended to do and it can be put up on line for virtually free and reach more people than the newspaper. If that is accurate another 5 million dollar or so hit to revenue. There are also other print publications that if print is needed can fill the void. The elected officials can save a lot of bucks by getting rid of antiquated print requirements and go to online for legal.

Anonymous said...

The OC Register get, I heard, about $5 MILLION a month to print LA OPINION. Why can't old Dee-noh start printing other people's papers and rake in that type of cash-0-laH? Hmm, instead, he's gonna dish out god knows how much to print it there too.

Anonymous said...

Dean-o does print other papers (or, at least did). The NY Post had an edition that was printed at Ontario for a while, and USA Today was going out of San Bernardino (remember, Gannett still has a stake in the Sun). But who really wants to read those in paper form out here?

Anonymous said...

if that five million is accurate i am sure that is with newsprint etc. the margin my guess is in the low teens...better than nothing if you have the press power to do it. medianews doesn't think like that which is part of their problem and demise. lots of shoes to drop on that mess quickly.

Anonymous said...

Experiments: Here's one that went splat -- the Cue Cat. Anyone remember this? http://www.naa.org/technews/tn001112/newmedia.html