TJ Walker explains why a Vermont newspaper couldn't find a buyer: production costs stay high while digital costs plummet. A media property is only worth what people will pay for it right now, which means the real value is in constantly making content people want to watch.
Chapters
Do you want to own a newspaper? That's the question put out by a newspaper based in Vermont, the Hardwick Gazette. And what they found is that no, nobody wanted to buy their newspaper. Now they're left with giving away the paper in a newspaper writing column contest, which is a little bit sad. It's a weekly newspaper, a small town, it has infrastructure, I guess, printing presses of sorts. And what they're finding is there's no value when you put something up for market, for sale in the marketplace and there is not a single offer, you need to conclude that the value is zero because that's what the market is offering now. This newspaper may have been an important part of social cohesion of this community for decades. I don't want to denigrate them in any way, but this is the new media reality. The cost, the means of production, of creating media gets cheaper and cheaper and cheaper every year. Digital, pixel, storage space, everything, it just gets less expensive. The hard part is creating interesting content that people want to spend time with. Whether it's reading old fashioned newspaper looking on a screen, text, audio, video. And increasingly the value of any media property is the new content you create and the audiences you can either bring in or keep. If it's a newspaper, the second you stop publishing for that day or you don't have a reporter, the value is zero. It's less than zero because you have rent, electricity and other hard costs associated with. Is perhaps a sad ending to this newspaper. Whether they get someone to buy it or win it and have to maintain it. If you win a prize that you paid nothing for and you do it for a week or two and you realize you're losing money and spending a lot of time, good chance someone will just walk away. There's going to be news in the world, there's going to be new ways of communicating that news. But at some point, if you have an infrastructure that's based on paper, printing presses, overhead, it just might not work anymore. You have to cut your losses and throw it away at some point. My own YouTube channel, my own podcast, my own website, blog included, we're only as good as the content we put out today. We're only real if we have an audience today. Otherwise there's no inherent value to any of this.
