A commitment to print and a plea to government

[gordo]

Two items from my local community newspaper,
A commitment to print open letter by a major western Canada retailer and the newspaper industry's plea for government help.
Is anything similar happening in your area?

 

[DYP]

Largely responsible for creating this panic. and now they want a bail out?

 

[tngcas]

Print newspapers are facing the same problem that brick and mortar businesses face when Amazon has been allowed to exploit legal loopholes so that everyone else pays the cost of their building out the infrastructure that will eventually make it impossible for brick & mortar to compete.

Facebook and other online platforms will do the same to print newspapers. The newspaper platforms want the best of both worlds. They could lock down their content so it's not sharable on Facebook BUT they won't do that because they want the traffic from Facebook and the reach of being able to access Facebook's customers. It's expensive to try to compete with Facebook by marketing your own stuff on your own platform so instead they want the government to force Facebook to pay them a percentage of their advertising dollars which Facebook uses to support their platform. They can't have it both ways. Either block off Facebook and put your time and money into your own marketing platforms OR keep using Facebook's platform to reach their customers at the cost of letting Facebook get the advertising dollars that the print companies could be earning.

That's the answer we give to Brick and Mortar businesses - either you figure out how to give customers very expensive "free shipping" in order to compete with Amazon or we don't care about you - go away while we do business with Amazon.