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A news drought in the provinces?

It looks as if those living outside the main centres in New Zealand may have to increasingly rely on word of mouth and social media for their news.

This comes in the wake of NZME's annoucement that it's binning a bunch of small-town newspapers in an effort to cut costs and lift the company's bottom line.

It was only a few months ago that Stuff also announced it was winding up the publication of a number of its free newspapers in smaller centres.

All of this comes on top of the closure or significant scaling back of other NZ news publishers such as OneNews, NewsHub and TV3 News.

Is it really just no longer possible to profitably deliver news in this country?

Well when Stuff sold for just one dollar a few years back, I think the message was very clear.

News is hard to make profitable.

Why is this?

Well there are, in my humble opinion, a number of reasons.

Firstly, most news organisations are old and tired. Instead of looking for opportunties to harness new tech in innovative ways to improve efficiencies and deliver a superior product, they tend to cling on to what they know, and suffer as a result.

Sure, all the news services have websites and some even have apps but they simply don't understand the underlying model on which the internet is based and the potential it has to revolutionise their industry. Simply having a presence in the online world is not enough.

Secondly, it strikes me that many news publishers have decided to trim costs in ways that significantly impact the quality of the product they're peddling. Investigative journalism (despite the claims by Stuff) is pretty thin on the ground these days -- effectively relegatedto the history books due to the costs associated with hiring *real* journalists.

Instead we get "fluff" that is designed to grab the attention of even the most acutely afflicted ADHD sufferer and get them clicking onto pages loaded with ads.

The problem with that approach is that it devalues the credibility of a news publisher and threatens to turn them from a source of objective, researched journalism, into an entertainment-focused tabloid rag.

When it comes to news, reputation is very important -- as the BBC has learned in recent times as its long-standing position as a "trusted source" has been continually eroded by scandals that have rocked the very foundations of its relationship with an audience.

Yet again, for the second time in just a few months, I find myself wishing I had the time to get back into the news industry and shake things up a little -- or a lot.

Why is it seemingly only me who sees the opportunties just waiting to be tapped and the profits to be made?

What's needed is a completely fresh approach, unencumbered by legacy operations that can suck your capital reserves dry before you bring a new model to market.

Maybe I'll have a good long think about this over the holiday break and who knows, if I'm feeling up to it, the new computer I've now got stuck in the corner and wired up to a separate internet connection may start spitting out news, directly to Kiwis all over the country and doing so in a completely new and novel way. No promises though.

Carpe Diem folks!

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