Movie listings moving online; it' both industry's and consumer's loss

   Continuing my free market rant (ranting is one of  the things I do well), along comes a story that says movie listings are being pulled from newspapers in favor of online. Movie listings, the small-print displays that showed all theaters, once were by far the best place to compare show times. Studies have shown (see previous post) that consumers prefer newspapers for comparisons.

 

     But newspaper managers are terrible at selling their strengths, and allowed the theater companies to break up the unified listing into listings by chain or, in the rare cases they still existed, individual theaters. This cut into the usefulness of the listings.  Of course, this was helped along by consolidation within the theater business allowing the big chains to dominate.  

    Now, way too late, the newspaper industry is telling theaters that eliminating print ads will hurt the theaters both in sales and in visibility.  Of course. But the industry is in thrall to cheap Internet marketing, so it doesn't really matter if it works (and I'll point to declining numbers attending movies to say that it doesn't work).