Challenges faced by traditional daily newspapers

Everyone wants to talk about the challenges of the newspaper industry today. Yes, there surely are challenges. Looking at it objectively, the traditional daily newspaper is a business model that no one in their right mind would start right now hoping to ever turn a profit. Now that may sound harsh, but it's true (on a side note, the same thing could be said about many other businesses/industries, including the United States Postal Service).

Here is my top 5 list of major hurdles facing daily newspapers today:

1. Information overload: The Internet has given readers literally unlimited choices of where to get their news.
2. Scope of their news coverage: The local daily newspaper is rarely seen as the best choice for world, national, or even regional news. However, they feel compelled to still try to compete in these fields, as it is what their readers are expecting. This nails down what their one true strength is: local news coverage. Many local dailies have figured this out, and are trying to spend more of their resources in this direction, but it is difficult given the scope of coverage that they traditionally have provided.
3. Expensive distribution method: The carrier-delivery model is a load of dead weight. With gas prices shooting way up, it has become more and more challenging to recruit and maintain carriers. With most dailies seeing falling circulation, it is also far less efficient to operate carrier routes than it was in the days when most people on a street were subscribers. These problems will continue to get worse.
4. Newsprint costs: This again is another expense that will never go away. Papers are trying to do as much as they can to save on this (narrower pages, cutting back or eliminating sections, going to tabloid format), but there's no escaping this large cost. It makes one think long and hard about the online only newspaper.
5. Trouble migrating online: Newspapers have struggled mightily in the online game. Many of them are getting around to it, and some are doing a fantastic job. Many papers spent years in denial, treating the web as if it was some kind of fad that would soon go away. They put up basic websites, just because someone told them it was a good idea, and threw some articles up there to make it look good. There was no strategy. Heck, they saw the web as competition. They struggled with what to do with their content - if they put all of their articles online, who would buy and read the print product? Putting their stories online before they came out in print - no way! Frequent updates? What?

So there's my top 5 - I could probably come up with about a dozen more if I needed to. Newspapers were, and still in many cases are, in the best position to be the leaders online. They have the resources, the connections, the local knowledge to not just be the leading source of local news, but more than that. They have the opportunity to create a local community hub online.

But the point is they have to step up and do it. If they don't, someone else will - or already has.