The Fate of Newspapers: Farm It, Milk It, Or Feed It 167
Hugh Pickens writes "According to Alan D. Mutter, after a 50% drop in newspaper advertising since 2005, the old ways of running a newspaper can no longer succeed, so most publishers are faced with choosing the best possible strategy going-forward for their mature but declining businesses: farm it, feed it, or milk it. Warren Buffett is farming it, and recently bucked the widespread pessimism about the future of newspapers by buying 63 titles from Media General. He is concentrating on small and medium papers in defensible markets, while steering clear of metro markets, where costs are high and competition is fierce. 'I do not have any secret sauce,' says Buffett. 'There are still 1,400 daily papers in the United States. The nice thing about it is that somebody can think about the best answer and we can copy him. Two or three years from now, you'll see a much better-defined pattern of operations online and in print by papers.' Advance Publications is milking it by cutting staff and reducing print publication to three days a week at the New Orleans Times-Picayune, thus making the Crescent City the largest American metropolis to be deprived of a daily dose of wood fiber in its news diet. Once dismantled, the local reporting infrastructure in communities like New Orleans will almost certainly never be rebuilt. 'By cutting staff to a bare minimum and printing only on the days it is profitable to do so, publishers can milk considerable sums from their franchises until the day these once-indomitable cash cows go dry.' Rupert Murdoch is feeding it as he spins his newspapers out of News Corp. and into a separate company empowered to innovate the traditional publishing businesses into the future. In various interviews after announcing the planned spinoff, Murdoch promised to launch the new company with no debt and ample cash to aggressively pursue digital publishing opportunities across a variety of platforms. 'If the spinoff materializes in anywhere near the way Murdoch is spinning it, however, it could turn out to be a model for iterating the way forward for newspapers.'"
Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
so you end up with a single source for your news... that tells you all the truth about exactly what is going on in the world/your area.
and if you believe that, you already know the Republicans are the only party that it makes sense to vote for.
I agree that free market economics are the way to run these things, but there is a market for printed news. Hopefully these places can streamline their operations (by merging various functions like printing and certain non-news parts) and continue to provide a product.
it's evolution: adapt or die (Score:5, Insightful)
if you become comfortable in a certain business model you will die. you have to follow where technology is going and possibly steer it to your advantage. newspapers ignored technology and now that it's hurting them, they trying to catch up. they should have been the leaders in the internet realm as it's purely a communications medium. hell, they should have been driving the internet to new places but instead they are reactionary and slow at that. blogs have shown up far too late and they strait up shot themselves in the foot with paywalls which were put in AFTER so many other site with free content thrived by using advertising systems that didnt suck.
you need to try a lot of different things. diversify your strategy or your one basket may be in trouble.
Investigative reporting (Score:5, Insightful)
Not the paragons of virtue they claim (Score:5, Insightful)
Move one province over and the major newspapers are owned by the richest family there.
But the internet is made up of a bunch of little twerps with nothing to loose and everything to gain(becoming the next Drudge) by blowing up an old boys club or two by exposing truths that our local newspapers are too incestuously invested in.... I Love It!!!
Re:subscriptions - shooting themselves in foot (Score:1, Insightful)
i say "sunday only, or i don't subscribe".
That amounts to: "Change the delivery method of all your subscribers to suit me or I won't buy 1 paper a week."
With thinking that idiotic I would suggest you take a pass on newspapers and try a weekly reader.
Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
That doesn't make any sense. Digital distribution is cheaper, which means you can have more competitors than you could with print distribution.
What's killing news is that digital means there are essentially no more scoops. When a story comes out, it is on every cable news channel well within the hour, and posted on every digital newspaper within minutes, and news aggregators like HuffPo within seconds. Before, a true scoop meant your had the only paper publishing a story that day. Not only did that garner eyeballs, but it brought prestige too. Now it mostly means increased news consumption overall with a lot of that consumption going to your competitors with no compensation for your own paper's work.
Which is why news agencies have been cutting their staff for years. It's cheaper for everyone to ride the coattails of someone else. It's even cheaper to have interns watching twitter for trending stories. The bottom line is news is both a product but also a public good, and like many public goods capitalism may not be the optimal structure for maximizing it's non-monetary benefit to society.
Re:Quality (Score:3, Insightful)
"Unbiased headlines" belong in the same fantasy bin as "bug-free code" and "honest project reports". Never happened, never will.
"Research" and "good journalism" do exist, and yes they're getting screwed because there's no incentive for them. Facts aren't protected by copyright, so they can't be monetized. There's no set penalty in news for getting it wrong, so there's no real incentive to get it right. "Research" in journalism has always been up against a deadline; but with 24-hour news, the pressure is on every journalist to report now, dammit, not in 4 hours' time when they might have some idea what they're talking about.
Re:Investigative reporting (Score:3, Insightful)
Have you heard of something called Fast and Furious? Not even Congress is allowed to look at documentation on that and found the Secretary of Justice in Contempt of Congress with bipartisan support for it.
You are confusing public information that doesn't make the political party in power being easy to get vs. documentation showing hundreds murdered by a policy being run by the party in power not available even to Congress.
All of the DNC is standing behind Holder still, despite the amount of negative things he has done. Your Party A/Party B is really only Party A. The DNC never throws out one of their own (with the small exception of Obama will throw out anyone if it a boost to himself for any reason). Examples... Charles Rangle (multiple time tax cheat) is running for reelection, Tim Geitner (tax cheat) is running the IRS, and on and on. Trent Lott lost Senate Majority leader seat for wishing Strom Thurman a happy birthday. So it only seems to work one way.
Where do Online News Aggregators Get Their News? (Score:2, Insightful)
Some people say the place they get their news is from online news aggregators. Well, if you look, most of that news comes from news papers and the newspapers get much of their news from sources such as the AP, Reuters, etc. Kill off the newspapers and online news will also disappear.
Re:Warren Buffet (Score:4, Insightful)
No website is going to report on stuff that matters to them, because those 1k or 30k people towns don't generally matter to them.
You believe that in a crowd of 1K to 30K people there is not one geek who can set up a LAMP with Joomla? And that there are no willing contributors who can master the simple user interface of Joomla? Life in small towns is not all hard labor, it's also long periods of boredom.
A newspaper is a costly proposition. You have to print it somewhere (your 1K village has no printing press!) and deliver quickly, and distribute. There is no feedback.
An electronic newspaper is free to publish. It supports logins for subscription if you insist on it, but logins are primarily for comments. This makes it interactive. That Fred Smith from a ranch 30 miles down the road does not come to town every day, but he is certain to log in every morning and every evening, read it all and add comments to whatever he finds interesting.
I haven't touched a newspaper in a decade. Probably haven't intentionally seen one either. Why would anyone want one? It's not even ecologically sensible, to kill trees just to deliver a few minutes per day of amusement to a family when the same, or better, can be achieved electronically, at a millionth of cost.