Where's the money coming from?

An interesting week in press terms.

As the Guardian announces that it will soon have a ‘digital first’ strategy (http://tinyurl.com/62l4tpa), the Northclife group turns a second of its provincial daily papers into a weekly (http://tinyurl.com/6fjktpc).

Fifteen or twenty years ago the people who run the big newspaper groups could see it going this way. The bit they didn’t foresee was how much of their revenue was going to disappear as online took over from print.

Their hope was that as newspaper sales declined, the whole business would gently migrate online – which would be an even better business than print because you wouldn’t have to spend money printing things and distributing them…

But they have not found a way, online, to extract from advertisers anything like the money they were used to getting for ads on the printed page. Or to get online readers to pay to read the product. And that is the whole ongoing issue, in a nutshell. They are accustomed to making very healthy profits. But now... where's the money going to come from?