De-classified: What Really Happened to Newspapers

By Nic Hopkins (Google Australia Blog)

In the mid-1990s the status of newspapers as the main source of news to society felt both indisputable and permanent.The Internet was a novelty. We accessed the web on dial-up modems, surfed pages using Netscape and searched for information on Yahoo!, Excite and Lycos. Around the same time, across the Pacific, Amazon had only just launched an obscure online bookstore. In 1995, I began my career as a journalist at The Advertiser in Adelaide. The web was so niche that there were fevered debates about whether we would need one “Internet terminal,” or perhaps two, for an entire newsroom.

Newspapers back then could afford to take their time with technology – there was no rush. They were unassailable and spectacularly profitable, thanks largely to classified advertising. Rupert Murdoch once described classifieds as “rivers of gold”.Today, as we all know, the landscape is vastly different. The print rivers of gold have dried up, print circulation has sharply declined. On the face of it, the news business has never looked so vulnerable. To me, and anyone else who has worked in print or simply loves newspapers, this has been a painful process. My dad worked in newspapers – it’s in our blood…

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