Newspapers don't respect and value their readers.
Six years ago, when I was but a wee young 'un in this biz, I was invited to several journalism conferences to discuss the future of media. I attended 2-3 of them before I quit them cold-turkey. The hostility in those rooms toward me was fierce, and it just wasn't worth the hassle. Rather than try and learn about what seemed to be working in this newfangled web, they saw me as the enemy and closed ranks.
At one of those conferences, however, a nice editor approached me. He had tracked the growth patterns of this site and was wondering what he could do to help his mid-sized newspaper become better acclimated to the web. My answer then, same as it would be now, was to embrace the audience and make them feel like part of the endeavor, create tools that would allow greater engagement and discussion between editors, writers, and readers. As a first step, why not add comments to your stories?
The editor sighed. You see, he told me, they had tried that already. The reporters hated it of course, since I doubt I've met a more thin-skinned group of people in my life than beat reporters. They're expected to become instant experts on any number of issues on a day-to-day basis, so they're touchy when they screw up, which is often. But the experiment in user feedback persisted until the newspaper's "star columnist" stormed into the editor's office one day.
"Get that graffiti off my page!" he furiously demanded. You see, to this pompous ass, anyone who would deign challenge him on the page containing his column was a tagger. And not in the positive, artistic, sense of the word, but in the "vandal" sense. And if that vandalism wasn't removed from pages containing his column, he would quit the paper. The paper's leadership panicked, and the commenting feature was removed from the paper's site.
What newspaper was this? The Rocky Mountain News, which completely ceased publication Feb. 27, 2009.
I wonder what happened to that "star columnist", whose arrogance back in 2003 prevented his newspaper from taking its first tentative steps toward a more collaborative and inclusive product. Those publications that survive and eventually thrive once again will be those who harness the creativity of their audiences and encourage not just their passive consumption, but also their active participation in the news gathering, analyzing, and dissemination. On this front, the track record of the newspaper industry has, thus far, been dismal.