For those who've left the biz

Well said, BTE.

 

I wasn't talking inventing. I was talking about after the item is invented. Hence, why I used buggy whip makers in 1910, rather than 1890. By 1910, cars were on the road, the Model T had been around a couple of years and it probably seemed pretty obvious that the horseless carriages were going to be more than a novelty.

If the business doesn't have knowledge, then that's where you hire someone to provide the knowledge and teach your staff. You hire one or two of Ford's assistants, or if you're in the lighting business, Edison's people, pay them well, and tell them to get cracking. And with the profits that you're already making, you already have the capital and resources to do the work.

Instead, to further the analogy, the buggy whip makers talked about how the people have always used horses for transportation and this new-fangled contraption was just a fad, cut a bunch of jobs, collected bonuses that could have gone for more capital, told the remaining workers that they now worked in a Local Buggy Whip Center of Excellence, told them to take extra effort to find a buggy whip buyer of color (only they referred to them by a different word), and then shrugged their shoulders and collected a golden Sopwith Camel parachute.

And it's not something that sounds easy in the abstract. Here's 15 companies that reinvented themselves: http://mentalfloss.com/article/22822/15-companies-originally-sold-something-else

It's not easy, by no means. But if they're going to be making the big bucks, then the failure of the business is on them.

 

At one point in my life, you didn't "need" the paper, you wanted it.

 

No kidding. As a kid, we got two papers delieved in the morning and I had read both sports sections before I left for school. We got the LA Times mailed to us (my mom got it for work) and even though it would be a day old, I would read that almost every night after I got home.

 

Where's the list of 15,000,000 that didn't? Or couldn't? Or tried and failed?

And don't think for a minute that "reinventing yourself" is going to spare the company's employees from massive layoffs. More likely, the company will demand employees with different training and a different skill set to handle the new workload. I hope my company DOESN'T reinvent itself for that exact reason.

And how's Coleco doing these days? I mean, after filing for bankruptcy in 1988, selling off all its North American assets in 1989, outsourcing thousands of jobs overseas and closing its American plants?

 

I got the L.A. Times mailed to me when I was a teenager in Tennessee. Usually 3-4 days old, but it didn't matter. I just marveled at it.

They did golf scores like I had never seen them done before:

(E) 280 ($900,000)
Player name....70-70-70-70
Player name....70-70-70-70
(+1) 281 ($550,000)
Player name....70-71-70-70
Player name....70-70-70-71

And so on. 30 years later, with all newspaper widths shrinking, this format still allows the scores with money to work in a 7-column agate grid.

 

Lots of revisionist history aka Nobody remembers the cuecat.

Newspapers did invest in technology and they did come up with out of the box solutions that just didn't work or weren't right for then.

What's destroying newspapers has been the ad decline, of course, but the hardware people have now also plays a large part. My iPhone can do everything that Radio Shack was selling 30 years ago as 20 different pieces of equipment and it does some things that Radio Shack couldn't dream of 30 years ago.

It can also do things that a daily print newspaper still can't or won't ever be able to do.

You also have the time factor, people have less leisure time now and are choosing to use that time in things other than sitting down and reading the paper in the morning or evening, whatever the case might be.

That isn't the failure of the newspapers. I mean when I was a kid, my dad wouldn't go to football practice with me or sit outside as we played in the yard. He sat on the couch or in his chair and read the paper. And if he did go to football or whatever, pretty good chance he had a section of the paper rolled up in his back pocket to have something to do so he wouldn't be bored out his skull watching kids run into each other.

Nowadays people have their phones for that and it gives them better content options if they do want to read something.

 

The elephant in the room of course is that the decline and eventual demise of newspapers may not matter to society as a whole.

It's not like media has gone away. I know one of the reasons it was so easy to leave was that I doubted the relative importance of what we were really doing in regard to the public's true NEED for newspapers in their daily lives. I thought at the time that I only felt that way because I was at a mid-size paper with terrible ownership.

But going forward, responses in this thread have added to what we all already knew: Newspapers are not missed, and won't be missed.

Not even by us.

 

Like I said, it's not easy, but it can be done. And what's to say, a company couldn't retrain employees to handle the new workload? Or are you saying that employees wouldn't be capable of learning? If your company wanted employees of different skills, and said that they wanted you to retrain to handle the job, are you saying you wouldn't do so? You'd quit first?

No reason to think that a buggy whip employee couldn't be retrained to turn a wrench on an assembly line. Except for the suits, who would rather have the employee sit in diversity seminars instead.

 

I agree with you on the national and even statewide level. There are plenty of options for national and state news online (let the buyer beware regarding the source), and of course no shortage of sports and entertainment coverage outside of newspapers.

The problem is who will cover local government, schools, police, etc. when the local print edition goes away? Online coverage isn't profitable or reliable ... often local news blogs are by someone with an agenda or ax to grind. Or worse, local "news" is self-serving crap posted to Facebook or Twitter by a government p.r. person (usually a former newspaper journalist).

I suppose as people move more often and farther away from hometowns, the desire for local news is fading away anyway. Just pay taxes twice a year, send your kids to charter school or homeschool 'em, and don't ask any questions.

 

That's funny. Aren't the people who homeschool their kids are usually the ones who are loudest about questioning the government?

 

The real question is: Who sees this as a problem, if anyone?

Do readers feel that they suffer without this coverage?