What is a newpaper?

A newspaper is a social institution that provides information needed by its customers.

At its most basic, a newspaper is the greensheet. People who want to sell something advertise. People who want to buy will pick up the paper and find the product they want. The payment for the advertisement pays for the cost of assembling and organizing the ads and delivering them to the potential buyers.

Sellers get wide distribution of their products at low cost. The greensheet offers them a forum in which to advertise and potential buyers pick it up in order to se what is available to meet their desires and compare prices and locations. But this is pure advertising. What is news for?

If someone wants to buy news, there are a number of newletters available. They are generally rather expensive and have limited distributions.

But general news can be used to attract potential customers and give them advertisements to browse. So advertisers, the potential sellers, pay in advance to try to change your behavior. If you get news that might effect your decisions for free, generally you will spend the time to read it. Or watch it if it is news on TV. Most of us find that gettng money is harder than getting time, so we'll spend time reading or viewing advertisements before we spend money.

The price of a newpaper, normally $.50, is so low as to be irrelevant. USA Today charges $0.75 per day, but it sells largely to travelers who are expected to pay more than the price they pay at home. It goes back to the idea that money you spend while travelling is not worth as much as money you spend at home.

So what makes a normal newspaper different from the greensheet where customers read it purely to get the advertisments? It gets people to read the news because they need that information, they then are (as a side effect) given access to the advertisements provided and paid for by the sellers. Such advertisements present information to the potential purchaser that induce them to buy products or services they otherwise would have been unaware of.

It is this provision of unanticipated information to individuals looking for new information (not related to the products or services being sold) which makes newspapers or most television profitable. Unfortunately, both newspapers and TV are losing the eye-ball time to the internet.

The internet provides the information many of us are looking for without the garbage data we don't want to waste time on. Advertisers are no longer willing to waste their money on Newspapers and TV as much.

So what is a newspaper?

It is an information media that attracts an audience becaue of the value of the information it provides to its readers. That's the greemsheet and other such free advertiser paid information.

Providing the same information to more readers lowers total cost per reader/viewer. That is, there is a lower cost per reader/viewer if you provide the same informatiom to more people. That also lowers to cost per eyeball to each advertiser. This is why "news" is attached to the reader - advertiser connection. The important element is to get more readers or viewer to watch the same advertisements. "News" is the way to do this.

"News" is whatever causes more eyeballs to pass over the same advertisements. It is in competion with entertainment at all times.

Newspapers (and by extension free TV stations) exist by attracting eyeballs to more advertisements. That is the primary function of such institutions. Not news, and not entertainment. Purely eyeballs to advertisements.

Is it any wonder that we get less and less real news over recent years?