Will coronavirus help or hurt newspapers?

Many newspapers are banking on it helping them, especially on the readership side, but Jon Allsop of CJR says there are problems lurking, primarily on the ads side.

I'm going to start with him and go further.

Paper dollars have long since become digital dimes, and per my extension of that, digital dimes have become mobile nickels. Per Allsop, Joshua Benton at Nieman Lab says the virus — businesses shuttering, or limiting hours, or in food and entertainment, limiting patrons, as parts of the problem — could further undercut advertising in general.

But for Benton, and as referenced by Allsop, that's just the tip of the iceberg.

What if there is a recession? And, I'm assuming that's fairly likely.

Remember, more and more medium and larger chains are owned by hedge funds. New Gannett / Craphouse. Dead Fucking Media / Digital First. Possibly McClatchy in the near future. Possibly Tribune and/or Lee. McC, Tribune and Lee all have Alden holding significant minority stakes. Then there's the walking zombie called CNHI, in its own category. And Advance, which essentially has already committed to a print-drawdown strategy toward eventual digital near-first.

What if the hedge funds, in the face of a recession, do yet more cutting? In a sense, from inside the industry, that's hard to picture. In another sense, it's not hard to picture at all. That's issue NO. 1.

And, that's even though such cuts aren't necessary.

Take Dead Fucking Media. Per The Intercept, it had a 17 percent profit in its fiscal 2017. Some papers were as high as 30 percent. That's good for pre-Internet days!

Now, some ad-side specifics.

Online, Benton says many advertisers (perhaps except those already selling out of certain products and they don't need ads) don't want placement next to coronavirus stories. That's more a big newspapers than small newspapers issue, but still.

The wipeout in sporting events. (Not that sports advertising has ever been much of a draw on the print side, but still.)

Next, the circ side.

Benton notes that your community daily is still often hand-delivered. It's hugely unlikely that COVID passes with a thrown newspaper. BUT? What if the mainly older subscribers start panicking?

On the digital side, it's wonderful that many media outlets have dropped paywalls.

But, 19 years ago, in a newspaper world that was still mainly print, did we get free newspapers for a week after 9//11?

Allsop doesn't discuss this part.

But I think it's likely that bigger newspaper companies seeing this as a way to permanently hook a whole bunch of new readers are barking up the wrong tree.

I'll venture no more than 10 percent of this new readership hangs on after the paywalls go back up. Since parents can get school district info on Facebook pages or Twitter, and ditto for others, I wonder how much new readership happens anyway, since AP and Reuters can be found without paywalls as is.