Seth Godin makes that point that the reason the New York Times matters isn’t about the delivery of news or even the analysis.

It matters is because everyone else reads it.

He adds that “we need to read what everyone else is reading in order to have a sense of being in sync. If it’s in there, it matters, because everyone else read it.

He cautions that the moment ‘everyone else’ stops reading Conde Nast or Publishers Weekly other trade journals, they fold. It’ll happen almost overnight, because reading them in isolation, without a connection to the community just isn’t worth it.

It’s easier to see this happening in the print media where newspapers are melting into obscurity.

US newspapers that have closed since the beginning of 2007 include:

• King County Journal, Wash. (circ. 39,100) 1/21/07
• The Cincinnati Post (circ. 27,000) 12/31/07
• Albuquerque Tribune (circ. 10,000) 2/23/08
• The Capitol Times, Madison, Wisc.
• Note: in 2008 it switched to online and twice weekly tabloid.
• South Idaho Press (circ. 3,850) 8/15/08
• New York Sun (circ. ~45,000) 9/30/08
• Baltimore Examiner (free circ. 236,000) 2/15/09
• Rocky Mountain News (circ. 255,427) 2/27/09

You can get the latest stats here: http://newspapermeltdown.com/?p=16/

David Swensen, chief investment officer at Yale University, makes a rather weak argument for endowments.

Here’s old world thinking at its worst.

“would enhance newspapers’ autonomy while shielding them from the economic forces that are now tearing them down.”

“By endowing our most valued sources of news we would free them from the strictures of an obsolete business model and offer them a permanent place in society, like that of America’s colleges and universities,” he wrote in The New York Times.

Why all the fuss?

Four newspaper companies, including the owners of the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer and the New Haven Register, recently y sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, while the Rocky Mountain News published its last edition Friday. foxnews.com

In the UK, it’s no better where 33% of local newspapers have disappeared between 2002 and 2013.

Local titles are already closing at a rate of 10-15 a week, chief executive Claire Enders said at a Westminster Media Forum Event.

Soon, the national newspapers will be affected, with two titles likely to close over the same period, echoing the forecast given by the Guardian’s digital director Emily Bell. Journalism.co.uk

Ok, so let’s go online.

Yahoo, with its legions of MBAs seems, equally clueless.

Scott Morrison tell us that Yahoo is winding down online-video service Maven Networks, which it acquired last year for $160 million, as part of the company’s continuing effort to shed noncore properties.

To put this in perspective, Maven, is the 3rd video property Yahoo has closed in the past eight months. It previously eliminated video streaming service Y!Live and online video-editing tool Jumpcut.

How many companies have closed 3 video properties in the last year?

Any why did Yahoo have 3 in the first place?

Isn’t one enough?

Yahoo has closed (or announced it will moth-ball) 20 services, including social-network site Yahoo 360 and Web hosting service GeoCities.

Yahoo Briefcase, an online storage service, was closed earlier in the year.

Before that it plugged the plug on Geocities.

Yahoo! is unceremoniously closing GeoCities, one of the original web-hosting services acquired. www.techcrunch.com

Of all these GeoCities hurts me the most.

It was the first site I used to create a little web page for myself, before I could afford a domain name and web hosting.

They let it slide, competition came and they lost customers, like me.

If you want to read about GeoCities these days, head over to Wikipedia, which wasn’t even around when GeoCities ruled.

Who’s next?

Read Seth: http://sethgodin.typepad.com