Google is aiming at the last firm revenue source of local newspapers with their base service, launched today. My family has strong ties to the newspaper business – my Dad worked on the editorial side of the business for ~25 years, my sister spent around a decade working on the administrative side, and I spent about 6 years in tech management there. I left in disgust after spending my time there trying to help them migrate their publishing online. While I had some successes, I left with the opinion that ultimately they were doomed to lose yet more of their revenue base. Over the past 50 years or so newspapers lost advertising revenue to radio, television, local cable, and direct marketing (ie junk mail), and as each of these categories rose to prominence newspapers percentage of total advertising dollars has declined. The same has been happening with the web, but their classified ads have been relatively stable (or at least, they were at the point I left the industry and stopped tracking it, which was about 6 years ago) – in fact the first dot.com boom increased classified ads from all the employment advertising that was going on. I know that in recent years things like craigslist and ebay have eaten into some of this, to what extent I’m not sure. Given Google’s market dominance you have to believe they’re going to take a big bite out of this revenue as well. If you’re interested there’s a pretty good article over on the nytimes.com site covering this.

For what it’s worth, I’ll shed no tears if the times analysis is accurate. I found newspaper editorial and management staffs to be blind, arrogant and obstinate when it came to thinking about the changes the web represented to their business.