Everyone knows why newspapers are doomed. Craigslist ate their classifieds, print is expensive, competing against a million niche blogs for attention is hard, etc.
But why did Craigslist eat their classifieds? Why is it hard to compete against blogs? The limitations of paper play a key role:
You can’t share a newspaper. “Hey man, I read this great piece in the Times!” “Great! Post it on Twitter and I’ll check it out!” “Sure, just need to find a scanner.” Newspapers should put a tinyURL right next to every headline. Author bylines should show their Twitter handle and blog URL. Every section needs an RSS and Twitter feed.
You can’t bookmark it. You can’t archive it or save it with Instapaper to read later with your iPhone or Kindle. Want to read pieces from several newspapers on a plane? Have fun schlepping a twelve inch thick stack of newsprint.
You can’t comment on it. The “letters to the editor” page is a joke, so why bother? Even if you get a personal response back from the author or editor, so what? Email doesn’t do anything for the public discourse.
You can’t track it. Clicks, views, ad performance, popularity, incoming traffic, user activity heatmaps, reader geographic and demographic information… this crucial data is lost to newspapers and advertisers.
Newspaper user interface technology peaked in the 19th century. Nobody likes it when websites paginate articles to goose pageviews, but flipping through pages of ads to “continue reading on page A29″ is torture. Used car “blow-in” ads clutter up your coffee table, and paper doesn’t come with a search box.
Archive value is lost. I would love to have 100+ years of daily blog posts to run targeted, relevant, trackable ads on. When mainstream media companies complain about “trading analog dollars for digital cents” this is what they’re not seeing.
Paper entombs the value of information. The internet multiplies it.