About a year of so ago, many thought local newspapers may be less affected by the Internet as their larger cousins. That assumption seems in doubt now, as some now believe the migration to the Internet could end up seeing the local newspaper industry collapse altogether.
"As online use has increased, the audiences of older media have declined," Harvard University professor Thomas Patterson said in a report on the year-long study issued by Harvard's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.
"In the past year alone... newspaper circulation has fallen by three percent, broadcast news has lost a million viewers," said the study, entitled "Creative Destruction: An Exploratory Look and News on the Internet."
The combined major web portals, Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YHOO), AOL (TWX) and MSN (MSFT) draw around 100 million visitors monthly, while major television web sites average only 7.4 million monthly. Even the big, major newspaper sites are only able to draw an average of 8.5 million visitors; like the Washington Post and New York Times (NYT).
Another big online trend is people are turning to news aggregator sites as means to access things that interest them. These types of sites are all growing.
For small or medium sized daily newspaper sites, there has either been a drop or no growth in visitors to their websites.
What's interesting, is last year people were counseling the local newspaper industry to go more hyper local to compete, now they're telling them to do the opposite: include more national and international news on their websites. To me that means most people don't have answers.
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