Hypothetical questions

[Yabadabado1]

It also doesn't mean no one likes personality radio anymore. It's simply a matter of sustaining a business. How many people still buy a printed newspaper? How does a business survive with a smaller number of customers?

I do, every once in a while, buy a printed newspaper. But few and far between mainly because they kept cutting out sections of the paper that I liked to read. Every time they raised the price they dropped another section. When it was sold to another company, I was told by a friend that works there that their goal is to raise the price of the paper -up to almost $3.00 daily, $5.00 Sunday now- reduce how many copies they print, reduce places where they are sold or just leave one or two papers at the most there to sell in the attempt to force the customers to eventually get their news from their digital web paper. Since most of the readers were my age or older and most don't do digital online reading ["It's not natural; I need the feel of a paper in my hand", "It bothers my eyes", etc. etc. etc.] it's been a spectacular failure. They've now reduced the paper to mostly national news, a sprinkling of local stuff, mostly if someone's been killed, crashed and injured several people or some huge fire, and sports, sports, sports! for a paper that's now thinner than a McDonald's burger.
And the business' survives by raising the price of whatever they're selling or sell off to someone/company that will probably just sell off the stuff they don't want and roll whatever's left into another cog of their corporation.

 

[johnbasalla]

, and sports, sports, sports!

A very true observation. There's money in sports. At the station where I do some air shows, they have AP network audio and "print" content. To do a local newscast, I'll go to the AP news website and click on "Ohio" news. There's always many sports stories, and often only one or two recent, as in the past few days, Ohio news stories. A friend of mine told me that the reason is, probably, that individual radio stations aren't sharing their local news with the Associated Press like they used to.

 

[Radio Bob]

I do, every once in a while, buy a printed newspaper. But few and far between mainly because they kept cutting out sections of the paper that I liked to read. Every time they raised the price they dropped another section. When it was sold to another company, I was told by a friend that works there that their goal is to raise the price of the paper -up to almost $3.00 daily, $5.00 Sunday now- reduce how many copies they print, reduce places where they are sold or just leave one or two papers at the most there to sell in the attempt to force the customers to eventually get their news from their digital web paper. Since most of the readers were my age or older and most don't do digital online reading ["It's not natural; I need the feel of a paper in my hand", "It bothers my eyes", etc. etc. etc.] it's been a spectacular failure. They've now reduced the paper to mostly national news, a sprinkling of local stuff, mostly if someone's been killed, crashed and injured several people or some huge fire, and sports, sports, sports! for a paper that's now thinner than a McDonald's burger.
And the business' survives by raising the price of whatever they're selling or sell off to someone/company that will probably just sell off the stuff they don't want and roll whatever's left into another cog of their corporation.

I couldn't have said it better and don't forget the little side weeklies that some of the dailies own. I can imagine the harried editors thinking, " Oh crap I still have to lay out the free Ditty Town weekly what can I run? Oh ya I'll duplicate that story we just ran in the daily because it's of general interest so what if the daily readers paid for it through their subscriptions and the Ditty Town readers get the story for free."