Dick "Hoops" Weiss among layoff victims at New York Daily News

Agree with you on every bit of that--especially feeling bad for a good guy like Hoops--until your very last words. While college basketball as a whole may be backsliding, particularly in the regular season, that has nothing to do with why the Final Four will soon be on cable. March Madness is still huge, as evidenced by the size of the TV contract that's putting the F4 on cable. Cable is at a point now where it's basically ubiquitous and it's no insult to have championship games on cable. Is the college football national championship also being on cable evidence that sport is backsliding too? I think not.

Anyway, good luck to Hoops Weiss.

 

IMO there was no boat to miss, insomuch as there was something that "Ah, we should have done!" that everybody somehow didn't do.

Unless you count "not inventing things" as missing the boat, in which case every person in the world other than Mark Zuckerberg and the person who invented Twitter missed the boat.

Classified was a huge moneymaker for newspapers, until craigslist came along.

But newspapers didn't miss the boat on that. Other than employment, craigslist ads are free. All the money craigslist makes in one year would pay for exactly one FTE at each U.S. newspaper. The decline/demise was inevitable, and all the forward-looking in the world would have only slowed it down perhaps a little.

 

"Down goes Drip, Down goes Drip"

 

Yes, newspapers did miss the boat in digital. In an effort to protect their stock prices, they invested money buying more newspapers, and investing in products like Career Builder.

It is a little simplistic to suggest that Facebook and Twitter are the only two products or inventions that newspapers missed out on. With relatively modest investments at the time newspaper companies could have become a part of the future rather than remaining in the past.

To further examples I have been using here, who better to create Bleacher Report, SB Nation or Grantland than newspaper companies who had all the cash and editorial talent necessary to make it happen? Could a newspaper publisher have pulled off what Arianna Huffington did?

Of course newspapers should not have invested in free classifieds. That's no answer for Craiglist. The answer was to invest in new products for the digital age focused on content.

And newspapers did not do that.

Newspapers needed to invest in, and invent new products that would emerge in the digital age -- the sort of information- and content-related products we are seeing now.

Successful digital investments back then could be paying for journalism now, and might have prevented some of the bloodletting we are seeing in newsrooms.

 

But the print ad revenue was going to crash regardless.

Thus, there is no way a typical metro could maintain its newsroom size amid a revenue decline of around 50 percent.

Yes, they could have invested in a Grantland . . . but the site is not a money maker, so what's the point? Bleacher Report seems to be doing OK, but even had some forward-thinking publisher thought of it 5 years ago, there would have been howling in the newsrooms across the country about how journalism had sold its soul to the devil. Only when the industry entered its death throes are people now coming out and saying, "Hey, what about Bleacher Report?" Was ANYBODY saying that in 2008?

As to whether a publisher could/should have "invented new products" . . . well, so could you. So could any of us.

And that's fine. But don't shake your head at the dunderhead newspaper publisher because he didn't invent what you didn't invent, either.

And we all shake our heads at "protecting stock prices," but that matters to a lot of people. People who hold the stock. And they likely aren't going to wait a few years to see if your investments are any good before they bail on you and send your stock plummeting.


I won't argue for a moment that newspapers COULD have done more. I'm just not as sure as others are that they could have been EXPECTED to. The decline was steep and fast and caused a lot of panic. And remember, most newspapers are/were still "profitable" --- the problem was, many had taken on a huge amount of debt a few years earlier and were simply trying to find ways to service that debt without going into bankruptcy.

 

I remember around 1997 or so, our editor said we were developing our Web site with the purpose of steering more people toward the newspaper. Back in 1997, was hardly anybody thinking that the Internet was going to be a shit-ton more than Compuserve chatrooms, AOL and porn? Sure, there's a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking now, but I don't think there was an inevitability back then. The Internet was slow dial-up that crashed all the time.

 

Apple stock was selling for $13.13 in December 1997.

Anyone who didn't buy any at that time kind of missed the digital boat as well.

And the porn was kind of expensive, too.

 

Well, this discussion has played itself out, so I'll back away. Newspapers saw the end coming and chose not to invest outside their core businesses. They protected their stock prices and now we are riding the industry to the bottom.

Some of the newspaper executives who refused to innovate and invest wound up walking away with millions in personal profits, while thousands of writers and editors got thrown out on the street.

So it goes.

 

Not for Sonner!

 

I pretty much disagree. I think we pissed away a lot of money on innovation that did not lead to profit, while cutting the core product to the point that its demise was a self-fulfilling prophecy. I think many executives got caught up in the ego thing of wanting to be "the one" who found the solution. This is not hindsight -- at the paper before my current one, I flat-out said that we should allow bigger companies to gamble and when one found a way to make money at it, we should copy what they do. If you say that enough times, you might be branded resistant to change, and of course the execs aren't gonna come back to you a decade later and say you were right. But my recollection is my bosses were quite emphatic about knowing what the future held, while I maintained that guessing is not a smart way to do business. To say it was reckless to give away the product was heresy then, and far more accepted now. I think what we had was a bunch of middle-age execs who were insanely afraid of appearing unhip (and thus prime candidates to get whacked), so they signed off on all sorts of stupid and self-destructive experiments.

There's nothing wrong with admitting, "I don't know." Like, I don't know what the Daily News should do, and I had the advantage of working there for a few years. I think they are in a unique and highly complex situation, and I take no pleasure in saying I think they are pretty much fucked no matter what they do. I'm happy for the people there that Mort Zuckerman apparently disagrees. I think he's made mistakes, such as changing editors way too often, but he still goes down as a hero in my opinion for saving the paper 20 years ago. The Daily News lost its way long before Mort arrived. I have an old history of The Daily News that said the paper originally succeeded where other downmarket papers failed because it did not take a dim view of its working-class readers' intelligence, instead making the assumption that people who read any type of newspaper have something going for them upstairs. History does not tell us everything, but it offers far more instruction than the tea leaves do.

 

Many eons ago, when I was a pup, I had an award-winning editor tell me that either the Post or the Daily News would fall. So far that hasn't happened.
Where did everything go wrong with newspapers in general? Well I believe it was when newspapers didn't pay close attention to the web and underestimated its potential. Impatience, such as Knight-Ridder's Vu-Tron experiment didn't help.
What can be done to save the industry? I really don't know and if I knew the answer, I'd be a rich S.O.B. However, the key, I feel, is attracting young people to read and to buy into the print product and its subsidiaries. I am enjoying the misinformation that bloggers and many websites are putting out. In their effort to be first, they are not paying attention to accuracy. That creates a credibility issue that has long been the backbone of newspapers.
Just my take.

 

Late to the party, so to the original point of the thread. Weiss is deeply sourced in the basketball community. CBS should hire him for the website and tournament coverage. Weiss was nice to everyone regardless of status. Also, Sean Brennan was let go as well in this purge. Another really well-sourced reporter and under rated. I hope they both land on their feet.