Michael Wolff

USA TODAY

The Financial Times, in a considered piece the other day, has, if there was any doubt, pronounced the newspaper business deader than a doornail. But its more advanced point was pronouncing the digital news business at the point of death, too.

In the past six years the print newspaper business in the U.S. has shrunk by more than half, in the U.K., according to the FT, by one-third, precipitating the announcement last week of the closing after 30 years of the print edition of Fleet Street upstart the Independent. But the effort to reinvent the business online — in the mantra of publishing, “digital is the future” — presents, if possible, an even bleaker picture. Despite the online world’s crowing about advertising growth, and the belief of many publishers that online ad revenue would surely replace offline, the per-view price of a digital ad continues to drop, and ever-more ad dollars are concentrated with Google and Facebook. Now, to boot, there are ad blockers: nobody ever has to see a digital ad.

Wolff: Ad blockers impair digital media

The passing enthusiasm for paywalls as an alternative revenue stream has, other than for a few must-have titles, produced scant revenue as well as falling readership and a collapsing brand awareness for many newspapers.

What’s more, the effort to compete with native digital news outlets like BuzzFeed means traditional news organizations, with traditional share price values, must, like the venture-capital supported natives, pay more for traffic than can ever hope to be made back from advertisers. In this model, the digital natives can yet hope to sell to deep-pocket buyers, whereas the traditionals can only go out of business.

The FT story cites efforts by Murdoch’s Sun in Britain, one of the world’s most successful newspapers, to first erect a paywall and then to dismantle it and instead pursue the Daily Mail’s show-biz-heavy digital tabloid approach — except that MailOnline, now one of the largest digital news sites, is yet unprofitable, and has fallen short of its own revenue targets.

In other words, while neither consumers nor advertisers will pay enough for news to cover its costs in print form, they won’t cover the costs in digital either. Immediacy and efficiency and searchability and connectedness have not proved to be any more valuable than the slow delivery of yesterday’s news.

Apps, once a promised land, got little traction with advertisers and also demanded that publishers transcend their skill and financial limitations and turn into software developers.

Even Twitter, once seen as a revolution in both the form and distribution of news, seems too, with its growth plateaued, to be a failed revolution.

At present, the FT concludes, there is no viable economic model for a written news product.

Hence, in some ever-increasing existential darkness, it’s back to the drawing board in search of one.

Rieder: Newspapers seek Silicon Valley magic

Some of the solutions seem arguably worse than even the present crisis, with publishers ceding their businesses, and relationship to their readers, in new publishing and traffic partnerships with the same platforms — Facebook, Google and now Snapchat — that are competing with them.

Another approach is to somehow change the nature of what advertising is and who actually creates the advertising content, to become a new sort of advertising agency. Or to compete with advertising agencies (another crumbling business). Or to be more like Vice, the digital media video darling which makes a significant part of its money from producing sponsored content. But that means not only going into the advertising business, but also the video business.

And, indeed, almost every news organization has glimpsed its future in video, creating quite a tsunami of unwatched preroll and, in a glutted market, a fall in video ad rates. The most ambitious new digital news organizations now imagine themselves escaping from Web video into real television.

A curious recent proposal by Ray Chelstowski, a newspaper marketer, suggested the newspaper business should see itself as rather like IBM when it lost its dominance in personal computing, and, likewise, turn itself into a kind of consultancy. It should offer not just advertising but a full range of back office business-support services, like accounting and health care management. What this might have to do with news gathering, Chelstowski didn’t say.

Likewise, the FT points to a series of astute acquisitions by newspaper groups, including real estate and job listing sites. (Conversely, the Guardian sold its interest in the highly profitable car sales portal Auto Trader and invested the proceeds back into its news operation, which lost $120 million last year.) The Sun, the FT pointed out, is now developing an online betting site. But while these seem like possibly advantageous enterprises, they do not seem to bring particular value to news gathering businesses.

Wolff: Guardian bet shows digital risks

There is, of course, the FT’s own solution which was to sell its enormous prestige to Japan’s Nikkei for $1.3 billion.

Wolff: FT sale shows strength of some newspaper brands

In a way, it might be good news to have at least clarified the point that digital is not the future of the news business. And to acknowledge that, in some farsighted new thinking, print might have some striking advantages — such that ads can’t be blocked. Of course, the bad news is to have realized this well after the digital promise has all but destroyed the business. But better late than never.

Hence, the challenge of the news business merely returns to what it has always been, the alpha and omega of how to boost circulation and ad revenue. It is just that now, after so many wrong turns, and hapless efforts to find new and easier ways to do it, it’s a lot harder.