The Fate of Newspapers: Farm It, Milk It, Or Feed It 167
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samzenpus
from the end-of-an-era dept.
from the end-of-an-era dept.
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.'"
subscriptions - shooting themselves in foot (Score:5, Interesting)
Nice power vacuum... (Score:3, Interesting)
As of recently, because private newspapers have been shutting down, going digital only, or otherwise withering on the vine, there is another type that is waiting in the wings to take over mainstream news:
Newspapers from governments and causes. The whole government of Qatar is paid for because of Al Jazeera. I'm sure other governments will be happy to step in to provide "news" that is slanted their way.
I'm amazed people like Rush Limbaugh have not stepped in to have their own newspaper printed in a region.
Sometimes, I hope for a "people's paper". Journalism is like the music industry -- completely and utterly dead, but there are some experienced reporters. Combine that with someone who can do basic paper layout, it might be possible for a local paper to be run on a shoestring and still provide reasonably accurate coverage on news topic. No, they may not have the cool Associated Press articles, but it is far better than nothing.
I guess they are milking it here (Score:5, Interesting)
Where I live (Vancouver, Canada) both dailies are run by the same company. They print the same stories and have the same pro-corporation slant. One of them uses smaller words and dumbs things down a bit, but they are basically exactly the same. As a cost saving measure and as an ultimate sign of cheapness and laziness, these papers reprint, annually, the exact same stories word for word. The editors are told what their opinions are and quietly promotes whatever rubbish the owner tells them to. There are so many "special information supplements", info-marketing inserts, infomercials, and advertisements disguised as news articles that it just has to be illegal.
Tell me why I should care if these papers die. As far as I'm concerned it can't happen soon enough.
billionaire Phil Ansultz bought lots of newspapers (Score:5, Interesting)
Anshultz media group also owns about a third of US movie theaters (Regal) and show production company that was putting on Michael Jacksons final tour.
He has not publicly stated what his goals are. His earlier investments were oil and gas, railroads, and fiber cable.
Milk for the win (Score:4, Interesting)
publishers can milk considerable sums from their franchises until the day these once-indomitable cash cows go dry
What, never? Locally they're milking it. The physical paper version is a spam delivery service with some stereotypical human interest stories that I'm not interested in and some traditional "journalism" that I'm also uninterested in (horoscopes, local event boosterism/complimentary copy, etc), and some AP news items from a couple days ago to fill unsold ad space. They will not stop delivering spam until mailed paper spam stops, maybe even after. The online version I guess delivers spam (I use a ad blocker, I don't even know) but primarily seems to make its money off pageviews of "comments" which are nothing other than paid political sloganeering where paid political operatives sling tired old slogans at each other as a form of spam.
The cash cow is, give us money, and we'll print your spam and deliver it all over our local geographic quasi-monopoly, I'm not seeing that going away any time soon. Their competitors are US postal mail and direct-mail-spam-services using US postal mail to deliver one pitch per envelope/postcard. Also there are aggregator competitors who mail envelopes stuffed full of coupons and spam and flyers in bulk from multiple companies rather than one promo at a time. Finally there are the special interest papers who will never die, the local free entertainment rag full of which band is playing at which bar and which bar has ladies night on which night, and the occasional political axe to grind slant paper.
Here's the formula. Get ad contracts with Best Buy / Verizon ATT whatever / local car dealers / Target / walmart / local stores if any remain in business. Surround with some fishwrap, containing a cute picture of a puppy or some kid, fill empty space with AP news articles from a couple days ago, print a zillion copies, hand deliver the spam and spam-envelope to approximately one third of local homes.
Quality (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with news is that the quality is crap. It's biased, the headlines are misleading, and there's often no research done ahead of time. Nothing of value will be lost there. But good journalism, research, unbiased headlines... they're getting screwed too. And that makes me sad, because the news is essential for the proper functioning of a democratic society. If we don't know what's going on, if we don't have people willing to get in there to get the full story, not just the press releases... we're screwed.
Re:subscriptions - shooting themselves in foot (Score:5, Interesting)
My pet peeve is how they keep treating loyal subscribers worse than new subscribers. I don't understand why either: They practically incentivize canceling your subscription. It's the same with mobile phones.
It's the tragedy of the commons (Score:5, Interesting)
Everyone thinks the news is free since it's all just a click away. There are lots of great aggregators like Google News, Yahoo, Bing, as well as specialty aggregators like Slashdot.
SOME news is free. Flikr and tweets by passers by are free, but a worldwide professional staff of reporters, editors and publishing infrastructure (either print or online) is expensive to maintain and will not survive years of wholesale freeloading.
Longtime newspaper readers have already noticed a substantial drop in the quality of almost every big major newspaper in the country (except for maybe USA Today, which is the exception that proves the rule) over the past ten years or so. They've all had to let go a large part of their staffs.
So just as people are whining that they don't make pop music the way they used to, so we're starting to see that with the reporting of the news. Yes, there will be plenty of news to read, more than you'll have time to read, but the quality has gone down and will go down further.
Re:80% of newspaper income from legal notification (Score:5, Interesting)
He's right -- for community weeklies and even some very small dailies, legal ads are lifeblood.
Much less so for mid-sized-and-larger dailies.
You want to see an incumbent business model act like a pack of pissed-off wolverines? Watch the small-paper lobby go to town when a state legislature suggests that putting legal notices online might -- might! -- be more efficient.
The issue is journalism (Score:5, Interesting)
Whether we read it on paper on on the screen does not matter. What does matter: "How are we going to support journalism?" . Especially local journalism. Who will cover the zoning board. Who will ferret out corruption? The meetings of the Virginia legislature used to be covered by eight reporters, now it is covered by one. ( From memory, I cannot find the story ).
New Orleans may give us a preview, since there is no shortage of corruption. While the cat's away.....
Re:Give them purpose again. (Score:5, Interesting)
My brother has worked for some major metro dailies in the Northeast, including as managing editor. He's recently decided to leave the industry at perhaps the peak of his career because he's convinced it's dying.
We discussed it and came to the same conclusion as you. The fundamental problem isn't the business model, it's an apathetic citizenry. If Americans cared deeply about civic issues and governance, rather than American Idol, they would find a way to fund good journalism. But if they don't, there's no business model that can keep good journalism going.
I only hope it takes something less than a national tragedy to re-invigorate the American people's concern for good governance.
Re:Investigative reporting (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, your Party A/Party B comment shows you don't pay attention. When the newspapers dig up enough dirt on a politician, they become a pariah, and other politicians will want nothing to do with them. Your comment is like saying that because athletes get away with some calls when the ref isn't looking that sports are better off without referees. No, the newspapers aren't going to straighten out politics, but they force politicians to maintain some level of honesty. There have been cases where newspaper investigations have triggered criminal investigations. I agree we're never going to get a clean government, but it's thanks to idiots like you that it is possible to get disasters with names like "Blagojevich" in office. They are not all the same, and they are not all crooks (especially the more local you get).
*Private companies can blow you off a lot easier if you start asking questions, and also will readily sue (retaining lawyers will strain the newspaper's budget). Digging up dirt on the government generally involves public documents and FOIA requests, which makes it easier to build a case and harder for the government to brush it aside.
Re:So? (Score:2, Interesting)
No one gives a shit what newspapers say any more. You can tell from the article title what the article is going to say, because it will be politically correct.
The newspapers are run by journalism majors who think their job is to "give voice to the voiceless". They're dying because people are sick of the same heterosexual white cismale guilt liberalism every day.
Newspapers have admitted to censoring race when blacks commit crimes. If there's a problem, they either find a way to blame heterosexual white cismen, or they ignore it.
Anyone who suggests anything else is accused of hatespeech and has their career destroyed.
Are you lost? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:subscriptions - shooting themselves in foot (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:it's evolution: adapt or die (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, at one point back in 2007 or 2008, Gannett made the decision to force all of their papers onto Pluck. It was infuriatingly slow, it could be hard to find stories, but obviously, it was meant to give the papers more editorial control over all of their content (it's nice when you can make stories suddenly disappear from memory) but also encouraged them to do it with reader comments. Opinions which differed from the paper's staff, reasonable and polite or not, were deleted. The paper would start "ghosting" users, so that their posts appeared when they were logged in, but nobody else could see them. Readers that agreed with the paper's biases could get away with any amount of abuse of other readers. The editorial staff and executive staff of the paper didn't care, they just let things fester.
Then Gannett made the decision that there was just too much abuse going on in the comments and that it was too much work to keep up with, so they switched to facebook commenting (the reality, based on reading a Gannett insider blog [blogspot.com], I get the distinct impression that may be that an exeucitve had pre-IPO stock in facebook, so this could be quite a personal boon as well).
Next thing you know, they were instituting a paywall, requiring a large mandatory subscription increase for paper-only subscribers that have no interest in digital, while simultaneously letting more than two dozen staff members "retire early" and shrinking the paper to a size that you couldn't start a fire with. About the same time, they printed a story on local tax delinquints, only they forgot to disclose that an editor at the paper was himself a delinquint, tried to scrub the posts when a reader posted it and then threatened legal action (ok, "consulting a lawyer about legal action") for libel when the story, along with the link to the state database, spread. A senior editor doesn't know that truth is an absolute defense in a libel/defamation case! And rather than simply admit it, the editor and one of the executives waged an online campaign against the readers before ultimatley hiding the comments.
They just seem determined to shoot themselves in the foot at every opportunity. And Gannett's executives just seem to be milking the company for every little drop they can get out of it along the way.
Not like they're the first industry to go belly up (Score:4, Interesting)
It's like watching the end of the horse and buggy, icebox, or gas lamp industries. Only with more copyright/extortion suits.
I stopped carring about newspapers (Score:5, Interesting)