Why Aren't Newspapers Breaking Out of the Box? Why does the newspaper industry, for the most part, have so much trouble adapting to the changing of the media environment brought on by the Internet and digital communications technologies?
A huge part of the problem is that newspaper companies are still being run, mostly, by people from the print side -- and who, though they may attempt to understand interactive media and the needs and media habits of young people, aren't effective at moving their organizations in a radically different, and necessary, direction. That's because they're still too tied to the print business and thus are unwilling to go in directions that might damage it, even if in the long run placing more resources and executive energy into new lines of (digital) business at the expense of the print edition is the right way to go.
Several of my anonymous respondents suggested that more newspapers need to put online editors in charge of the entire news operation.
