They are issues that need addressing, but the absolute number 1 reason they aren’t embracing the web as they might, is down to revenue.

With a magazine, there’s an obvious revenue stream. You write content, people pay for the magazine, and can’t read your content otherwise. Along with the relatively easy advertising style where companies can just buy pages and make it look however they want etc….

On the web, it’s a lot more difficult to charge for access to content. They see this as dissolving their little empire, each magazine in the company I work for has its own little area that it feels it’s responsible for, and few of them understand how to embrace the web and make it work for them. Most try and avoid it, put the bare minimum up.

Advertising on a web site is a lot trickier, they want all the visual control of print design, mixed with the interactivity of the web. People don’t flip through pages of a web site, you can’t very easily just have separate pages of adverts that people see as they are browsing, you’ve somehow got to work it into the pages as they are.

The company I work for seem to want to do a lot of advertising, and a lot for communities. The problem is, they skip straight to that part, and kind of leave blanks where the description of how they will do that should be.

Liked what you just read here ? Vote for it on Blogmemes ! Newspapers are going through difficult times, not from the blogging competition, but because they do not know how best to exploit the Web.