Quote:
Originally Posted by Ohiogirl81
Holy crap.
The Advocate likely will hire back some of the T-P staff, but news reports don't give a number.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/...umber-62862245
And yes, Quietude is correct: Newspapers aren't run by newspaper people - either from the news or business sides - anymore. They're owned by hedge funds who squeeze every cent out of them by decimating staff and reducing the news hole, until the public no longer sees the value in subscribing. |
I would offer that a big part of the problem behind newspapers' decline was that they were run by newspaper people.
Mind you, being owned by a hedge fund is no picnic either. But until ten years ago, I never encountered a newspaper that didn't behave as if it were still 1975 and CNN had not gone on the air yet. They pretty much functioned with the insular mindset of a monopoly, thinking that they were public necessities such as the power company or the water works.
It's important to consider that the entire history of business since the deregulation of airlines has been the destruction of the traditional distribution channel. The break up Ma Bell. Wal-Mart coming out of backwoods Arkansas to completely steamroll Sears and JC Penney. The iPod and iTunes. And, relevant to newspapers--the Internet. Yet, because they were run by newspaper people, they weren't aware of the titanic shifts going on in the business world. Or refused to see. Or, more to the point, lacked the understanding of what they were seeing. Just like the folks in the car industry right now, they blithely thought themselves immune to what they were witnessing.
Newspapers like to ascribe to themselves the quality of intellectual rigor. After all, you have a bunch of writers pecking away at keyboards as the sole reason people buy it. However, at its core, a newspaper is nothing more than a gigantic system, a funnel where words, images, and advertisements pour in one end, and spit it into a finished product on the other. It shouldn't matter whether the news is a rolled-up wad of newsprint in the driveway, or something read on the laptop while drinking your morning coffee. But newspaper people continued to think in the most archaic and hidebound ways. The papers I dealt with literally regarded the internet as nothing more than a fad. Why? Because they were newspaper people who couldn't imagine that people would get their news from any other source. One of my clients snorted when I mentioned TV, "Why that's a lesser medium." But that lesser medium was stealing eyeballs and ad revenue. At one point, classified advertising constituted 35% of a newspaper's revenue. Yet newspapers sat there like dinosaurs watching the meteor streaking in while sites such as EBay and Craigslist made hay. One would have thought that they would put every dime they had into developing some kind of digital response. Nope. The online product they eventually developed was miserable, full of bugs and never worked right.
I remember sitting in a meeting with one of the Advance paper's leadership. The entire point of the summit meeting was how to move the television section of the paper from Friday to Sunday. Okay, first thing's first. This was 2000 and anyone with a two-digit IQ wasn't using the newspaper's TV section in the first place. They would just hit the Guide button on their remote controls and see what was on. Or look online. But there were 20 people from the newspaper in the meeting thinking this would solve all their problems. I kid you not.
One of the brighter reps for the paper threw me a softball question on what I thought they should do. "Scrap it entirely and throw your entire budget into helping people understand why they need a newspaper in the first place." I pointed to their declining circulation numbers to show how they were hemorrhaging readers, particularly for people under 50. "Move the calendar forward ten years..."
And I was interrupted by someone saying, "Oh, don't say that to the publisher. He doesn't want to see the circulation numbers." That should tell you everything you want to know right there. Even then, they continued obsessing over what variation of the 13-weeks-$14.99 offer would be the silver bullet for their declining revenues. Either that or how to cook the books on their circulation numbers to justify their existence to people who create FSIs.
In once sense, you're absolutely correct. Newspapers' survival hinged on one thing and one thing only: Being the indispensable source of local news and information. Unfortunately, newspaper management and the newsrooms alike were slow to understand that--if they understood it at all. After all, in every daily there was an editor who wanted to write Big Picture editorials about Big Events as opposed to pedestrian stuff about the local councilman being on the take because he jimmied the local zoning ordinances for a buddy.
As a result, every single one of them wasted precious resources trying to be the end-all, be-all information source for their readers, covering international entertainment news, international news, and everything else they could see online or cable. Instead, the sole hope of newspapers is the dogged pursuit of engaging readers with news that is immediately relevant to them in their every day lives. That means going to school boards and covering crime, not worrying about what Lady Gaga is up to. For that there's Buzzfeed.
That newspaper I mentioned earlier? They went to three days a week for a metro exceeding one million people. That is just an absolute crime. A shame, because had they listened to people who weren't newspaper people, they might be doing a lot better today.
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