Want to sell more papers? Make your paper useful!

Quick note, I'll post a better and more complete article some time in the near future on Medium.

Newspaper circulation has fallen to, well, let's be honest, pathetic levels over the course of the past few decades. When I was a kid, the nation's newspapers sold some 60,000,000 copies weekdays, and that was when the population of the United States was just 180,000,000. That's one newspaper for every three people, including old folks, little kids, multiple adults in each household. Today, daily circulation is more like 20,000,000, with a population of 330,000,000. That means circulation is only a third of what it used to be, while the population has nearly doubled.

I'll save you the math -- for every 6 people who used to read the newspaper when John Kennedy was the new President, when they could get their news from the television and from radio (sounds wierd now, but it was a real thing then), only 1 person bothers to buy a paper today. If you're in the business of selling newspapers, that puts you in the same league as people who sell horse saddles and barrel hoops. Still around, but not worth a whole lot.

Anyone who cares about newspapers at all already knows this. It's nothing new. It's not news.

How did things get this way? And is there any way the situation could be turned around?

Conventional thought that I see expressed is that people don't like to read, that they have no patience for the lengthy articles in the newspaper, that they don't like to think deep thoughts, and so the vast majority of the simple-minded, lazy members of the general public get their news from television, from web sites or from social media. Easy sources of snippets of information dumbed down and chopped up into tiny snippets people are willing and able to glance at while they go about whatever else they're doing.

Lots of highly-credentialed and well-respected people believe this. I respectfully disagree. It's nonsense, it's the product of lazy minds mired in muddy ruts of stale thought. Respectfully.

Newspaper circulation has fallen because they have treated the news as a form of entertainment. If it bleeds, it leads. Crime. Corruption. Gossip. Sports and recipes. So what.

People pay for things they find of value, and they pay fair price for the value they perceive in what they want to buy. They don't find anything of particular value in the newspaper, so they don't buy it.

If you want to sell newspapers, you need to provide value, value in the eyes of the people you want to buy your newspaper. You need to provide a service, make yourself useful, and useful in a way that people will pay for.

It's actually fairly easy to say what, in concept, would be of value to the public: solid coverage of all the things people need to know about because of it's impact on their lives, presented in a way that is thorough, meaningful, useful, relevant and timely -- particularly 'timely.' That means coverage about things on a routine, predictable basis that lets people see potential problems when they can be dealt with calmly and intelligently, not after they've already exploded in your face.

And thoroughly. That means you find out everything that a person needs to know about a situation, not just what is exciting, or controversial, or that someone is making a fuss about, but also the odd and crazy things that flow into it or and tied to it, the direct and indirect effects it can have, all the people whose lives are impacted by it, in one way or another. It means your coverage is not glancing over some things while obsessing over others. It means your newspaper is motivated by the concern that you may be missing something important that people need to know, and not just what happens to support some agenda or undercut another, even if the one agenda is good and the other evil.

If you can't depend on your newspaper to get you everything you need to know, then you're left with whoever you happen to talk to, or whatever other place you go to find out what's up. The reality is that most of the time, you're going to people who don't know any more than you do, or people who think the way you think. You're getting only a slide of the world, not the whole thing.

So, where's the value in the newspaper? Why bother? Does it tell you anything you really need to know in order to make decisions? To fix a problem before it becomes a disaster? To know what your government is doing -- other than gossip and slander and puffing about superficial political nonsense?

People pay good money all the time for things they find useful. They're not buying newspapers. That should tell you something.