Fixing this mess

I think it takes more than optimism. Most of us were all optimists when we started. The truth is we're trying to compete in markets we can't compete in. I agree with Xodus that giving away the product is not the right move, and Frank makes a great point that the newspaper's bread-and-butter is local advertising, not something that could benefit from google. I believe that the complete wrong move is giving people less-compelling news written by people with less knowledge, but that seems to be may papers' anwer. Newspapers have struggled in the past, but I believe the key is finding out where the strengths are in newspapers and focus on those. Any time I hear some bigwig compare the newspaper to google, or talk about the newspaper's online site becoming it's main attribute, I wanna gag. In reality, sites like Yahoo and Google make money because they filter nothing (meaning people can use them to access the biggest on-line moneymaker - porn). I doubt that's really where newspapers want to end up.

 

I know that what you say is the company line at newspapers, but it's the wrong way to approach things. Yes, there are other sources out there that will put a weak product on line. That's exactly why when you have a strong product you shouldn't devalue it.

If you're at a decent-sized paper and your paper covers the local MLB or NBA of NFL team, it's a safe bet that your paper covers it at a much higher level than most other sources. And it's also a strong possibility that it's the only local source actually covering the road games.

You just can't keep devaluing your product and expect to survive.

 

Optimism doesn't pay the light bill.

 

That's a great way of thinking.

 

And there's a competing school of thought that says you shouldn't give the competition a foothold on the platform (the Web) on which consumers are going to want/expect their information to be delivered for perhaps the next 40 years or so.

You're talking about surrendering ad accounts to competing media because your pay site isn't going to generate enough page views to create the necessary ad inventory.

Divert enough traffic to the TV stations' web sites and now suddenly they have the ability to compete with your classifieds sites by collaborating with cars, employment and real estate vendors, further eroding the newspaper's revenue base both in print and online.

You **have to** put your best foot forward on the web now to beat back the upstarts, or you won't have the resources to do it later.

 

Here is what's truly depressing.

Nearly every newspaper executive, CEO, publisher, and executive editors are called every name in the book when the next round of layoffs are anounced. They're called incompetent, greedy and uncaring. Often times, of course (fill in your own percentage), the unflattering descriptions are accurate. But here's the thing.

From the business side, executives aren't in the habit of killing their business, if for no other reason, they are greedy and it's in their best financial interest to see the industry survive and prosper. And I truly believe that it really does kill a lot of the executives and editors when they lay off workers and when they look at the effect these times are having on all of us in the business. I'm not going to be cynacal enough to assume that everyone from MEs on up to CEOs are uncaring boobs.

And that's what depresses me. No one from the greedy short-sighted leaders to the truly best minds in the industry know what the magic formula is. The unfortunate fact is that the times are changing and there aren't any easy answers. For every possible ''solution" that we think of or editors think of or beancounters think of, there are many reasons why each ''solution" won't work.

There are many newspapers and newspaper companies in the country, and no one seems to have a solution. And the combination of the internet and a bad economy, times are tough everywhere. Hopefully, this is rockbottom and not just a ledge before another greater drop into the abyss.

 

If that's the way you think it is, then why weren't major daily newspapers given away for free when word on page was the cutting edge of technology? If you think that 3-5 badly writtten paragraphs on some TV station's website is going to slake the thirst for information in sports fans, then I believe you are sadly mistaken.

 

Yes, people (many, but I concede certainly not all) will pick 3-5 poorly written paragraphs over the newspaper site because it's the difference between free vs. paying for it in an era in which 99.999 percent of what's on the web happens to be free. And it won't continue to be 3-5 bad paragraphs as TV and suburban weekly sites evolve. TV sites have already gotten dramatically better online than they were even as recently as two or three years ago (with **professional** video as an added bonus), and they'll have more money to invest if their traffic doubles or triples overnight when the local newspaper's site gets converted to pay-per-view.

As for the other issue, consumers paid for newspapers in the old days because there weren't other options for news -- five minutes of news once an hour on a local radio station doesn't count. Additionally, consumers understood that there was a tangible cost associated with the delivery of a newspaper either to the doorstep or to the newsstand (ink, paper, delivery trucks, carriers, etc.). Other than relatively minuscule costs related to bandwidth/throughput, the Internet does dot have similar costs.

And now there are plenty of pubs (not necessarily newspapers) available for free on news racks everywhere because there aren't sufficiently superior to online content to justify charging for them.

 

Based on past performance, what leads you to believe local TV stations would invest any such profits in the news product?

 

Because radio/TV isn't a dying medium. I don't minimize the problems electronic media have these days, but they're still a lot more stable than most newspaper corporations.

And there is a fixed number of FCC licenses available, so the entity is always going to have value above and beyond the parcel of land upon which the office is located. Anyone with a barrel of ink and a roll of newsprint can start of their own paper -- and there are sound economic reasons why few have tried in the last decade.

 

But PressMurphy, the MO of local stations has always been to pocket the money and spend as little on news gathering as possible. I see no reason to believe they would change that.

 

I'm not naive enough to argue with your question, because it is both tempting and easy to take the money and run. What I will reiterate, though, is that electronic broadcasting has a brighter future, so they're more likely to invest in that future and continue reaping profits.

As for the print industry, look at it from the perspective of a mid-sized metro that's publishing these days on a set of presses that's 30 or 35 years old. They're already handicapped with what they can do with color configurations and speed, and now they know they have to install new presses by around 2013 or 2015.

How would you feel about investing between $40 million and $75 million on a replacement when your circ is slipping a consistent 3 percent (or worse in many cases now) a year and you might only get 20 years of use out of the new presses instead of 40 before newspapering as we know it goes belly-up. And, by the way, you need to make the decision in the next 18 months in order to get the plant up and running in 2013 even though you don't know when the recession will end.

Meanwhile, broadcasters are going out and snapping up low-power stations to extend their reach. It makes sense because they're expanding in their area of expertise.

Some newspapers, too, are investing in their future. But it's primarily in online, niche pubs and other endeavors outside their core competency. There's not necessarily anything wrong with that, but it's a tacit admission that their primary product is disintegrating.

So do they retard the growth of their key replacement product (the Web) by hiding it behind the "pay-per-view" wall or do they go all out to grow it now, perhaps beating other local media to the punch on innovative content, strategic alliances, etc.?