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Doctorow doesn't know what he's talking about
There's a rash of hyperbolic commentary lately about the "death of newspapers" from people who have no idea what they're talking about. Doctorow's post is just one more float in the parade.
In the United States, the typical newspaper is fundamentally a local-regional advertising business. Local and regional advertising is changing, but it's not going away.
The typical American newspaper produces a portfolio of print (daily, weekly, monthly) and online products. These include both mass and targeted media. It turns an annual profit (not a loss) ranging from 10 to 20 percent. The ad revenues alone -- not counting print circulation --roll up to a $45 billion annual total nationwide.
Some newspapers are losing money and will close this year. But the more common situation is a publisher cutting staff, pagecount and sometimes even frequency in order to maintain profit margins so that corporate finance requirements can be maintained.
Corporate finance is the real problem. Over the last 20 years, newspaper owners borrowed heavily to buy more newspapers (and take over other chains), assuming that historically aberrant profit margins -- sometimes in the 35 to 45 percent range or even higher -- would continue forever.
The current business recession has suddenly placed those debt-laden companies in peril. Lee Enterprises, which recently narrowly avoided bankruptcy by renegotiating some loans, actually turned an operating profit of over 20 percent last year.
I'm not in denial about the effects of the Internet. They are real and serious, but they are longterm, and they are not the cause of the crisis currently facing newspapers, regardless of the self-serving BS being spread by various media pundits.
The irony is that the financial crisis has awakened slumbering newsrooms and sales forces, while robbing them of the resources they need to respond to those longterm challenges.
Ever since I left print and moved to the online side of journalism in 1994, I've been battling people who had their head in the sand about the importance of the changes in media caused by the Internet.
No more. Confusion and bewilderment, yes. Denial, no.
I fully expect to see some big bankruptcies in the next several months. Journal Register Co. declared bankruptcy Saturday, following the overleveraged (Chicago) Tribune Co. and the Minneapolis Star Tribune in seeking protection from creditors. Some big dailies, such as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Rocky Mountain News, will close, along with a lot of weeklies.
But hundreds of other papers will continue to operate profitably.
Among them, some will be smart enough to invest in creating new products that are more aligned with our net-connected and increasingly mobile lives.
[Note: Worrying about this stuff is my day job. You can follow me on twitter or at my blog.]
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Re:No wonder media companies go under
Some facts that might get in your way:
* Newspapers have experimented with specialty devices -- and premium/pay services -- for years. Doesn't work. Generalized computing devices and free services have flooded the marketplace and there's no turning back.
* Newspapers are already dropping print editions all over the country. Gatehouse itself announced yesterday that it's killing the printed Kansas City Kansan, and going online-only. I have yet to see a case in which this is anything other than a desperation move by a failing business. In the case of the Kansan, I think they only have 7,000 monthly unique users on the Web. That's not a viable business, regardless of what you might "save" by not manufacturing and distributing a printed product.
* Gatehouse's complaint -- and I've read it -- contains a laundry list of issues, some of them in direct conflict with one another. But there is one charge that isn't easily dismissed. The Boston Globe is essentially creating a derivative product to enter hyperlocal markets where it previously had no presence. Gatehouse points out that nearly all the links on the local Globe products are Gatehouse content. That may flunk the fair-use test. (On the other hand, that argument effectively puts Gatehouse in a position of claiming it's entitled to preservation of a monopoly.)
* Gatehouse licenses its content under a Creative Commons no-commercial-use provision. Defining what's commercial use is a big hairy mess, but it's not possible to argue that the NYT company is a noncommercial effort.
Other perspectives:
Mark Potts: http://recoveringjournalist.typepad.com/recovering_journalist/2008/12/gatehousegate.html
Dan Gillmor: http://www.citmedialaw.org/blog/2008/gatehouse-v-ny-times-co-not-so-simple-after-all
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Re:A whole book just for themes?
If you read the Drupal theme developer's guide you'd know that basic Drupal theming works exactly that way. A page template is simply an HTML page with tags inserted where you want specific components to appear.
The power of Drupal's approach to theming is that you can do as little, or as much, customization of detailed component formatting as you want.
It's a site development platform, not simple blogware that lets you play with look and feel. This is why the Onion, HamptonRoads.com, New York Observer and Ozzy Osborne's website can all run Drupal but not look or act like my weblog or JumpTV. -
Re:"Wall Street Journal" is the right model.
Everyone talks about newspapers going under, but you never hear anyone (seriously) talking about the AP or UPI going under.
UPI went bankrupt years ago and has changed hands several times. The company that now owns the UPI brand actually is an agent of the Unification Church (also known as "the Moonies"). Hardly any newspapers use UPI these days.
The Associated Press is a cooperative owned and controlled by American newspapers. The AP has gone through a massive restructuring over the last several years as it scrambles to adjust to the realities of news distribution in an age when distribution is near-free. Demand for its core services from its owner-members is declining as those newspapers themselves shift from global to local content focus. Many editors of smaller newspapers are contemplating dropping the AP entirely. They're not ready to do that, but they're thinking about it.
As for the Wall Street Journal's economic model, it's not relevant to a discussion of general-circulation newspapers.
WSJ sells essential business information to subscribers who don't pay with their own money (they typically use company expense accounts). No general-interest local newspaper anywhere in the world has been able to make such a model work in its own market. Local civic news may be essential to the function of a democracy, but that doesn't mean anybody wants to pay for it.
Old models and old assumptions -- such as those advocated by "reporter" -- do not work today. Newspapers that do not change their fundamental approach to coverage are losing audience to other media choices that didn't exist 20 years ago. Attempting to charge for content only accelerates that loss.
I don't mean that newspapers are doomed, but those that fail to change and adapt to the new environment are doomed. The ones that adapt can thrive. But the necessary changes are not small and a lot of people -- including many older subscribers -- aren't going to like those changes.
Large newspapers are at highest risk, as they are unable for economic and cultural reasons to cover the kind of hyperlocal news that might rescue their falling readership numbers. As their circulations sag they become perilously close to catastrophic failure of their mass-media business model. You can't run a mass medium if you don't have mass.
Small newspapers, neighborhood-level newspapers, are extraordinarily strong. And there's significant growth in free-circulation newspapers both in the U.S. and international markets.
So this is not a problem of print versus electronic distribution. Print still works. But old assumptions about content and business models do not work.
I do this for a living. I'm a strategist for a newspaper company, and I do not advocate blocking Google from spidering local content. I do advocate blocking the spiders from wire feeds, which we have done for years using a robots.txt directive. -
The full speech is online ...Interesting comments. You all might wish to read the full speech, not just the "sound bite" extracted by the BBC.
Here is where you'll find it.
Sorry about the tardiness of this reply; I have been vacationing in southwest England.
I would certainly agree that traditional media, in general, do a terrible job of performing as a trusted guide -- which is exactly why I issued that challenge. If you'll read the speech you'll see that I talk about public service in the literal sense (not the ego-journalism that passes for public service in most organizations).
-- Steve Yelvington
editor and Linux user since 0.96 or so