The Times of London is behind a paywall and doing everything right, but still can't pay the bills. Producing quality news content is expensive and people seem largely unwilling to pay for it.
The newspapers that seem to be hanging on all appear to be cost-cutting like mad, moving from reportage to opinion and chasing the lowest common denominator.
The most successful news website in the UK (and second in the world behind the NYT) is The Daily Mail. Their web content is completely different to their print content. Offline, they're a populist rag specialising in paranoid scare stories about gypsies, muslims and cancer. Online, they rely heavily on linkbaity celebrity gossip and pictures of Pippa Middleton's arse. They've worked out that what drives traffic is different to what sells papers. "Quality" is the least important aspect of a news operation, at least in terms of profit.
It's not just subscriber revenue. As others have pointed out, for most newspapers subscriptions were/are a minority of revenue.
The fall of newspapers is actually a perfect storm: classifieds (something like 40% of revenues, historically) have been gutted by sites like craigslist, and CPM rates for print have been on the decline because the internet has essentially infinite inventory. In the web world, we think a few dollars' CPM is pretty decent, but the newspaper industry is built around the assumption of much higher rates (i.e. in the tens or hundreds of dollars per thousand "impressions"). You can't build a strong local newspaper with paid reporters, investigative journalism, etc., on a $2 CPM. The market is too small.
You left out another element of the storm: the bread and butter newspaper ad clients were: real estate, finance, auto sales, and national retailers. Guess which industries have cut back drastically on marketing during the recession.
"Producing quality news content is expensive and people seem largely unwilling to pay for it."
I'm not sure how to precisely formulate this, but it seems to me that an ironic effect of our ever-increasing command over automation, manufacturing, and production, and all the other things that used to take humans but now are done automatically far cheaper, is that in relative terms an hour of human time has become ever more expensive, even as we theoretically have many more of them since we have more people and need fewer people to support them. You can see that in things like how expensive a maid service is in an industrialized country vs. less industrialized ones relative to the average local wealth level.
"Real" news collection isn't really something that can be automated, though. It can be assisted with databases and content management software, but the hard work of digging through facts, correlating them, doing interviews, background checks, and all the other stuff necessary for a really good story isn't getting easier any time soon.
I'm really at a loss as to how this can be made economical in the modern environment, even in theory.
> "Producing quality news content is expensive and people seem largely unwilling to pay for it."
Most news organizations produce news content for average people, for whom "the news" has little practical day-to-day value. Thus, their "users" are generally unwilling to pay for the content (and are therefore sold to advertisers as products). STRATFOR [0] takes the approach of producing very high quality news content that is of legitimate value to businesses, who are willing to pay decent money for that level of insight. (I don't know if they're doing well financially, just putting them out there because of their different approach.)
Patio11 is fond of pointing out that you should target the right customers, and avoid the pathological ones. This seems to me like a good example -- target the businesses that actually need to know about geopolitical shifts in Indonesia, rather than the average Joe who finds it interesting but not impactful.
The newspapers that seem to be hanging on all appear to be cost-cutting like mad, moving from reportage to opinion and chasing the lowest common denominator.
The most successful news website in the UK (and second in the world behind the NYT) is The Daily Mail. Their web content is completely different to their print content. Offline, they're a populist rag specialising in paranoid scare stories about gypsies, muslims and cancer. Online, they rely heavily on linkbaity celebrity gossip and pictures of Pippa Middleton's arse. They've worked out that what drives traffic is different to what sells papers. "Quality" is the least important aspect of a news operation, at least in terms of profit.