In response to a piece in The Economist titled "Who Killed the Newspaper," a number of voices have weighed in on the future of the media everyone loves to flog. Jemima at PaidContent does a nice job of summarizing the various points of view, but there are a couple I'd like to highlight here.

First, Richard Zannino from Dow Jones says that while they might be cheap now, online ads will rise in price compared to print. I think that's correct in theory, but what are we using as a standard? Keep in mind that in a lot of places publishers are discounting print ads to keep advertisers coming back to the format, so if that's trending down and online prices are trending up, of course they're going to meet sooner than expected.

Second, it seems that some people at least are still thinking in terms of home pages. They complain about the decreased profits from someone coming to a deep page on the site via a Google search as opposed to making people visit their home page first and force them to dive in from there. The logic there is that they can charge more for a banner ad than for a text ad on a deep page. That's awfully narrow thinking. While it might be true from a revenue point of view, consider this: Without those search engine results you wouldn't be getting those page views at all.

Do I think newspapers are dying? Possibly, but it's only because they haven't undergone any consistent maintenance over the years. They've stagnated. And while it's true to some extent that the resources a professional news organization can bring to bear outweighs what most others could do, a lot of them aren't using those resources to provide readers with what they need or want.