Via
Reflections of a Newsosaur
A. Why it would be suicidal for any reasonably profitable publisher to stop its presses in perpetuity.
B. Why a paper going to digital-only publication would have to eliminate roughly half of its editorial staff to achieve even a modest profit on that operation.
Notwithstanding the above realities, this is not to say that publishing won’t, or shouldn’t, migrate to all-digital media in the future. Before that happens, however, the economics of the business would have to change far more radically than they have to date.
Because newspapers on average derive approximately 90% of their sales from print advertising, the only ink-on-paper newspapers that can afford to attempt digital-only publishing are the ones that are irreversibly losing money. Moving to digital publishing is the last, best hope to salvage at least some value from their waning franchises.
But those web-only franchises would produce far less cash than their print predecessors, reducing the value of those businesses by several magnitudes. How much less? A conventional newspaper moving to online-only publishing might produce at best 10% of the cash generated by its print-plus-online predecessor.