NP Refugee

What's the Boston Globe Worth? About a Buck

I continually wonder just how much the liberal bias does, in fact hurt the newspaper industry. It has to be taking a toll. Perhaps the growth and Fox News and the decline of CNN may be indicative of the effects of liberal bias in media. One really must ask just stupid an entire industry can be to alienate what is 50% of the populace--a percentage of the populace that is more likely to read deeply and delve past the headline in Yahoo! or Google news.

The Journalism Bubble

Again, Jeff--spot on. What you've left out of the equation is the effect and contribution to the demise the craft unions have had on the industry as a whole. Journalists do need a wake-up call. I knew many columnists who used to laugh about only producing two columns a week which took them all of two hours to write and then taking the rest of the week off. They got paid handsomely for their total of four hours they worked each week. It works out to roughly $350 for every hour they actually worked, by their own account.

My opinion is that the journalists who are committed to the trade will end up writing for suburban papers (for a fair wage) who will take on the traditional role of the metro paper, providing investigative insights into the communities where the audience is deeply passionate. That is fertile ground yet to be tilled. Suburban weeklies will become suburban 3-a-weeks. They will augment the chicken dinner, Eagle Scout award stories with investigative stories that seek to hold the powerful accountable and serve as a voice of the community in that which matters most because it's that which is closest to their homes.

I certainly hope I'm correct.

The point is, there is still a need for journalism, but it has to be fresh and insightful and not the run-of-the-mill regurgitation of someone else's insights and investigative work. So much material in a metro is a hodge-podge of syndicated, borrowed, nonfactual material that the newspapers come off as, frankly, lazy.

One colleague used to describe the newsroom as "the fat, dumb, and happy." I always used to say that they'd produce better quality journalism if one could find a way to compensate them on the basis of a "reader resonator meter."

Sorry, Rupert: Micropayments Mean Microprofits

You are all correct about what got newspapers to where they are now (and I've had 25 years and a ringside seat). Jeff's correct assertion that publishers have deluded themselves into believing that newspapers were read every single day, cover-to-cover is the problem for which there is no readily available solution. How does one provide a strategy for a business model predicated upon sheer myth?

The NPs thought (wrongly), or perhaps led their advertisers to believe that they were operating all-you-can-eat, when, in fact, their readership was eating cafeteria-style. Frankly, I've never known ANYONE who reads every single line of every paper, but the ad rates were predicated on inflated prices and egos, and the notion that a subscriber spent their entire day reading the newspaper. They actually had convinced advertisers that their subscribers read the paper cover-to-cover, when, in fact, the readership surveys should have given them a dose of reality. They should have been pricing the sections based on the readership of that section. And the whole "pass-around" theory of readership; don't even get me started. It is, after all, just an unproven theory.

I'm afraid the answer, Mr. Rifle, is that there is no strategy for a house of cards. The next evolution of NPs will be where the over-priced, over-inflated, ego-driven writers who really never worked very hard (because no one expected them to) will go to work (and work hard) for suburban papers who will, in the future, have to step up from chicken dinner, eagle scout stories and start holding the powerful accountable from the grass roots. Let's face it, most people in the suburbs really don't care what's happening in a metro center, unless it somehow affects them; but they DO care (dearly) about what's happening in the suburbs where they live .

And those suburban papers will have less ambitious profit goals (which sounds nicer than saying they will be less greedy) and will live very lean. Sort of like how newspapers used to be before fuzzy math and fuzzy logic were applied.

Newspaper Circulation Skids Another 7% over Latest Six-Month Period

When all is said and done, we'll all find out that the main issue with newspapers was one of credibility. The issue has been there all along; it's just exposed terribly in a world where the bright light is cast on media bias and untruths so quickly by other sources less beholden to the old guard. In the end, it will be determined that they are far from the unimpeachable source they claim to and should be.

On the Constitutionality of a Newspaper Bailout

Sorry, dude. Things get twisted all the time. How we went from allowing freedom to worship in the 1st amendment as a constitutional ban on any reference to religion is exactly why the slippery slope rule applies. After all, they "dumped a bunch" of money into GM, and the next thing you know, the president is firing the CEO. So the editorial board of newspapers will all of sudden be full of ACORN.

No thanks. The day they accept a dime from Uncle Sam is the day I'm an ex-newspaper reader because any sliver of credibility they have will be gone. Then they can dump all the money they want into it and it will be "red all over."

And if the newspapers accept a dime, they might as well be Robert Johnson at the Crossroads because their editorial souls will be gone. As it is now, they're teetering--maybe that's part of the problem.

Newspapers Can't Compete with 'Us'

Think about this: the newspaper's content, most of which they don't own nor create is available in lots of places. The newspaper is under siege from all sorts of directions. I can get comics from comics.com; I can't get that on the newspaper's web site. I can get stocks from-what-1,000 different places? I can get the syndicated national stories from just about anywhere. Obits are available numerous places. I don't have any problem finding puzzles online from numerous sources. A great number of the published editorials are available on the commentators' web sites. All of that content used to be the NP franchise. So it's not just about Google, it's the cumulative effects of having commoditization of what the newspaper used to monopolize in a local market. Going from monopoly to commodity is a giant killer. I agree that the small town newspapers will be the ones that last. If you consider the papers closing shop thus far, most are in 2-newspaper towns (Seattle, Denver). But the small local papers seem to understand the need to drill down into the communities they serve--because they can, while big metros seem intent on being a national newspaper. Unless the big metros bust up their newsrooms and start small suburban bureaus that can go deep in communities while having a "most important" fill the main section, I'm pretty sure the erosion will not subside.

Think about this too: NPs don't put the local box scores and the other fine print online. To a local market, that's valuable.

I, for one, believe that Murdoch knows exactly what he's doing. If you've been following the latest moves by the NP industry, there's a bit of interesting news where most have signed on to work with a search engine directly. If I were Murdoch, I would start a news search engine and sign on all the NPs as true partners. I would add some things the SEs don't currently do. I would have wild cards in search strings, so if you don't know some characters, you can use *, I would also allow searchers to index the search results according the date the article was published. Then I would cut off the Google and Yahoo! spiders. Goodness knows, promotion wouldn't be a problem.

News flash. Only 20% of most newspapers' visits come through search engines. Most NPs are bookmarked.

It would take a giant to make it happen, no doubt. Goodness knows, the NP companies can't get along to make it happen.

And I could almost argue that the suburbanization has had almost as profound an effect as the Internet on the precipitous drop in circulation. Publishing the latest antics about which councilperson is taking a bribe in a large market? Most people in the suburbs are embarrassed and think it's pathetic, but beyond that, they really don't care. It may as well be 500 miles away.

My prescription for survival is what everyone keeps telling the NPs: start digging deep into the communities and quit trying to cover the world. My fear is that they cannot get out of their own way to do that and the new NP model will be reinvented by those outside of the NP industry today with a fresh perspective and no ties to legacy systems and processes that are outdated.

Too Many People Don't Care If Newspapers Die

Within the news ecosystem, there are many parasites who exist off of newspapers and their editorial departments. People just don't realize the vacuum that will be created. At the same time, newspapers may have to die in order for news to become resurrected in other forms (not unlike the big auto guys). News has become commoditized in many markets, but the source is usually the newspaper. There's not a local radio station who doesn't start their day by opening the newspaper to write their scripts. Same for broadcast TV.

How the news business will be resurrected will make for an interesting case study. There will be winners and losers. I don't believe that the insert business will all go direct mail, either.

This Week in Saving Newspapers

I grieve the death of the 4th estate. Talk about being too important to fail...

Like watching the Senate go away, or something. Removing an all-important leg of the stool. They are too important to democracy. Don't count on radio, tv, or Inet to do what the papers do. I just wish they would take their responsibility more seriously and report with less bias and a mission of fairness over their own political ambitions. Of course, it's been that way since the 1800s, so it's unlikely to change anytime soon.

I don't mind the collusion thing, but nobody seems to be talking about the arcane cross-ownership rules. Let the NPs work with and own TV stations. Both are in real peril. Allowing cross-ownership could be a real shot in the arm. The FCC, through the cross-ownership rules, imposes barriers that are not only unnecessary, but they also are incremental acid eating into the 1st amendment.

Many forget that most television stations were begun by newspapers in the first place.

Several newspaper companies have sought to have the cross-ownership rules overturned, yet, those in power have no incentive to have the watchdogs get stronger. They use the unique, independent voice argument as though media is limited in the same way it was in the 1950s. They're really just fine with being able to control the press.

That's the story that's not being told in this whole argument. We should certainly start there. By having one news department for television stations and newspapers, the cost would be contained and the reporting might be better--but the goal at this point should probably be existence.

And exNewspaper is obviously bitter, lacking understanding that most of the news that is read over radio, put into television newscasts, and blogged, all comes on the backs of an editorial dept somewhere. Without newspaper editorial departments, democracy is toast... and the bloggers would have to become investigative reporters. I love the blogs, but let's face it; they would have to put on clothes and get out and do the work of the newspapers in order to have any sort of future in a post-newspaper world. They would face the same economic challenges in a world of entitlement, where everything on the Internet is free. Who would pay their travel expenses? How would they be compensated?

I so want to see newspapers survive, but they have so many fundamental flaws that are deeply rooted that anything short of radical metamorphosis will be woefully short of the necessary transformation required to survive.

WSJ Downgraded; What's Next for Newspapers?

I see no way out for NPs. Assuming the recent research is correct that the erosion has stabilized, the situation still leaves NPs with the reality that fewer people in the newsroom produce fewer stories, which in turn directly impacts readership--which results in fewer papers being sold--which means less advertising, which means the spiral of death. Or maybe they'll publish 3 days a week; a more likely scenario, actually.

Telling Statistics on the News Business

As someone who was there in the NP online fray since late '95, I am of the opinion that there are some givens:

* An editorial dept will never be sustained by online ad revenue in neither the current online ad model, or the current editorial newsroom model-at least for most NPs that would be considered local and not national. For that model to work, CPMs would have to be multiplied by a factor of 10.
* The answer is/has always been there, but ego and arrogance have always kept the NP industry from solving their problem. They've never been able to get out of their own way.
* The traditional NP can't be fighting with the online group, whether the online is treated as internal or as an external entity.
* The NP industry has allowed the AP to sell its birth rite to the search engines where the money is being made. What a great deal! NPs pay to create the content, GIVE it to the AP (or pay the AP for the privilege for accepting their content), who, in turn, takes money from the search engines to undercut both the print and online editions of the papers.

The ONLY answer I see (trust me--14 years of experience here) is for the NP industry to create their own news search engine, market it heavily in a collaborative effort, etc. Their NP search engine should allow for search results to be organized by release date. Imagine the ad revenue that would shift from the search engines to the NPs!! Whatever they do---keep the AP out of the equation; they are part of the problem, not the solution.