Next up: Chicago Tribune

You were making good points until the last sentence. It’s kinda hard to embrace change when you’re going to either lose your job or, if you somehow aren’t cut, end up having more work dumped on you.

Change is happening. That doesn’t mean one has to be happy about it.

 

Your cause and effect is backward.

Newspapers turned into worthless pieces of trash BECAUSE of the massive drop in revenue that happened when they were still high quality products.

They didn't suddenly turn into worthless pieces of trash out of nowhere, causing their revenue to drop.

 

This is absolutely true. The same could be said of products like film cameras or Blockbuster Video. They didn’t lose revenue because they sucked. They didn’t lose revenue because somebody came up with a higher-quality version. They lost revenue because nobody wanted them anymore.

 

A lot of good points here, especially about how the financial structure that supported print has eroded away. It's not coming back. It's just a matter of how long the old oak tree can hold on before it is swept away.

Regarding your last sentence, it's not just us worker bees who are complaining and resisting change.

I worked at a small daily paper in Michigan in the late 1990s. There were small companies even then building primitive newspaper web sites, and providing a way to convert news stories from the print edition to online stories.

We had a staff meeting with the publisher about this possibility. If memory serves, starting a website would have cost a few thousand dollars.

Instead, management doubled down on "INFOSource," a call-in-to-hear-the-news gambit we had, because "we can sell ads for that. And it's already popular with our advertisers."

No one resists change more than the beancounters, Chad.

 

I agree with most of your points, but also to save you some grief in the future - Fred is essentially the "back in my day" crank of the board, even by this board's standards, where most posters are happy to wax poetic about the best high school running back they saw X years ago. If you ask him to, Fred could tell you why the failings of newspaper management directly led to every bad thing that's happened in the 21st century, whether the "bad thing" is Trump's election or Kim Kardashian.

 

What I've never understood is how crappy newspaper publishers are as businessmen.

"Oh, but ads will support these websites!" How about pulling in ads and subscriber revenue? You might've made more money!

 

I believe newspapers were run by very very dumb individuals. Some by very wealthy third generation men/women trying to keep mommy and/or daddy's newspaper running smoothly and also by companies' leaders at your Gannetts, Knight Ridders, all the chains that were not yet taken over by hedge funds.

Look ... this business has had a monopoly on baby boomers and still does. Any business that can't find a way to survive when it already has a 95 percent of all baby boomers hooked ... that business is run by very dumb people.
Now? Now it's not a real business. It's for years been a front for hedge funds, who have made a fortune off selling of iconic properties, prime land locations and by bleeding every last penny by firing people, cutting pages, etc.

Cmon. How many baby boomers are in America? They are a nice solid starting point to a profitable enterprise. THEN you use innovation to make the product a must-have for the millennials and others who may like pro sports, may like college sports, may like to read about their kiddies online or in the old fishwrap if they have to.

There's NO REASON for anybody to read the fishwrap now, it's that worthless yet the boomers are still paying up and reading the fishwrap out of habit. The internet product? There's really no reason for anybody to check it out. Boomers are not into computers for the most part; millennials and others can get by with espn.com, mlb.com, nba.com if they need a quick check on their phone. Newspaper websites are awkward and clumsy and basically a huge failure. Newspapers will never make a good dollar online. That's why once the fishwrap is discontinued we will see 75 percent of all sports writers gone within a month.

 

Yes, newspapers were run by dumb individuals, but they weren't dumb for going online. They were dumb for not getting online sooner. They were dumb for not beating Craigslist to the punch and finding a way to monetize classified ads online. They were dumb for not beating Facebook and Google to the punch on being able to monetize advertising online. Those companies are bringing in revenue by offering exactly what newspapers used to offer to advertisers before the internet.

 

What is your stance on my point that you ought to be able to remain incredibly popular when you have zillions of baby boomers locked into your product? You were working from a strength there. Boomers will buy your product, now adjust and make sure you snag the millennials. Make it somethin they can't do without. There is still a market for newspapers if they were worth a damn. Remember because of the suits they went from amazing products to utter trash all because of things I've mentioned.

 

A professor named Clayton Christensen wrote enormously influential books about change in business. He did a study of 100 years in the backhoe industry (bear with me) and he found that established companies did a good job of improving their product when technology evolved incrementally. But when there were disruptive changes (in backhoes it was dramatic changes in engine technology) established companies went out of business. Management did not have the knowledge to compete in a new market.

When the Chicago Tribune started in 1847 the business model was to sell an advertiser supported mass market newspaper with low circulation rates. Low circulation allowed advertisers to reach a mass market. 150 years later the business model was the pretty much the same. Remember John Wanamaker, who is credited with saying "I waste half the dollars I spend on advertising, I just don't know which half" owned department stores and advertised in newspapers.

But technological advances have allowed advertisers to move from spending lots of money on mass market ads to targeted ads for specific audiences. And Google, Facebook, et al are really good at selling targeted ads. Newspaper executives who have lived with he old mass market model their entire life have no idea what to do. It is true in lots of industries. How many main frame companies successfully made the change to PC's?

 

Dead wrong, for reasons that have been explained to you many times.

But we also have a recent case study: a guy named Aaron Kushner bought the Orange County Register a few years ago and thought as you suggested: beef up the print product, appeal to the core subscribers, don't keep charging your best customers more and giving them less, don't worry so much about the web. He added pages to the newspaper. He hired dozens of reporters.

Three years after he bought the paper, it was back in bankruptcy.

 

My stance, which isn’t a really a stance so much as fact, is that in the best of times your beloved baby boomers were only making up 20 percent of a newspaper’s revenue, at best. So if you just remain incredibly popular with them, you’d only be making ... 20 percent, at best, of what you were making 30 years ago. It’s unrealistic to lose 80 percent of your revenue and think you don’t have to trim your costs by just as much.

The thing that you still don’t understand is that the business model was never really about appealing to readers. It was about appealing to advertisers. Readers were barely paying for the product. Advertisers were the ones footing the bill. Now there’s no money coming in from advertisers - not because the product is bad, but because they can advertise elsewhere and reach a much larger audience at a much smaller cost.