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December 17, 2008

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Tim

AdAge isn't saying newspapers are going to survive online by building massively popular Web sites. The analysts are pretty clear that it takes an enormous scale -- over 200 million, or even 800 million, views -- to have hope succeeding in that mass-market advertising model, and that local news sites have pretty much no chance of doing it. In fact, the story quotes an analyst who says the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have *a* shot at that kind of reach, but they're "years behind that pace." Not exactly optimism.

Chris Boese

True, Tim, they may not be ABLE to do it. It could be within the reach of some.

When I was at CNN, they put out a press release that said on any given news day, we had the potential to reach an audience of a billion people globally. But that was still figuring in the mass one-to-many pipe.

My point was that, regardless of whether or not they could do such a thing (and most local news falls falls on the long slope of the long tail as well), the political implications of even striving for such a thing require a mind-set of the old mass media push model, or rather, an attempt to colonize the upstart interactive Internet into being good passive consumers of massively distributed one-to-many content products.

Even if they COULD do such a thing, I'd argue that they SHOULD not.

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