Posted on Wednesday, December 09, 2009 9:47 AM
Momentous changes can seemingly happen on the fly: After a lifetime diligently reading my newspaper every morning, I have now switched to the online version of de Volkskrant. No more struggling to carry tons of old newspapers to the paper bin every week! I now receive a pdf document by email every morning, and clicking on an article will open it in a separate window. I am impressed, it works really well.
The circulation of dutch newspapers have been declining for years, since long before internet presented additional competition. I have not seen recent figures, but no doubt the dutch newspaper industry is in the same dire straits as their colleagues elsewhere. But I suspect that the explosion of online news will not be as threatening to dutch newspapers as is the case in the UK and US: there are no dutch Huffington Post or Politico, and as the market for dutch language news is relatively small, I doubt if a professional news blog can survive economically. For news in Dutch, the existing news organizations will remain the primary venues, online or not.
Does this sound plausible? Is the effect of the blogosphere on the newspaper industry in any way related to the size of the potential market?