Slashdot Mirror
The Fate of Newspapers: Farm It, Milk It, Or Feed It
Hugh Pickens writes "According to Alan D. Mutter, after a 50% drop in newspaper advertising since 2005, the old ways of running a newspaper can no longer succeed, so most publishers are faced with choosing the best possible strategy going-forward for their mature but declining businesses: farm it, feed it, or milk it. Warren Buffett is farming it, and recently bucked the widespread pessimism about the future of newspapers by buying 63 titles from Media General. He is concentrating on small and medium papers in defensible markets, while steering clear of metro markets, where costs are high and competition is fierce. 'I do not have any secret sauce,' says Buffett. 'There are still 1,400 daily papers in the United States. The nice thing about it is that somebody can think about the best answer and we can copy him. Two or three years from now, you'll see a much better-defined pattern of operations online and in print by papers.' Advance Publications is milking it by cutting staff and reducing print publication to three days a week at the New Orleans Times-Picayune, thus making the Crescent City the largest American metropolis to be deprived of a daily dose of wood fiber in its news diet. Once dismantled, the local reporting infrastructure in communities like New Orleans will almost certainly never be rebuilt. 'By cutting staff to a bare minimum and printing only on the days it is profitable to do so, publishers can milk considerable sums from their franchises until the day these once-indomitable cash cows go dry.' Rupert Murdoch is feeding it as he spins his newspapers out of News Corp. and into a separate company empowered to innovate the traditional publishing businesses into the future. In various interviews after announcing the planned spinoff, Murdoch promised to launch the new company with no debt and ample cash to aggressively pursue digital publishing opportunities across a variety of platforms. 'If the spinoff materializes in anywhere near the way Murdoch is spinning it, however, it could turn out to be a model for iterating the way forward for newspapers.'"
my local paper i only want on sunday. in attempting to subscribe for sunday only, they say "no, you have to take it friday/saturday/sunday". i say "sunday only, or i don't subscribe". they wouldn't budge. guess what i decided :)
on the occasion i want a sunday paper, i go to the local gas station which is not far from my place and pick up a paper. i won't be shedding any tears when they fold (ha!)
Where I live (Vancouver, Canada) both dailies are run by the same company. They print the same stories and have the same pro-corporation slant. One of them uses smaller words and dumbs things down a bit, but they are basically exactly the same. As a cost saving measure and as an ultimate sign of cheapness and laziness, these papers reprint, annually, the exact same stories word for word. The editors are told what their opinions are and quietly promotes whatever rubbish the owner tells them to. There are so many "special information supplements", info-marketing inserts, infomercials, and advertisements disguised as news articles that it just has to be illegal.
Tell me why I should care if these papers die. As far as I'm concerned it can't happen soon enough.
Most notable the San Francisco Examiner. Several of his papers are distributed as free dailies in major cities.
Anshultz media group also owns about a third of US movie theaters (Regal) and show production company that was putting on Michael Jacksons final tour.
He has not publicly stated what his goals are. His earlier investments were oil and gas, railroads, and fiber cable.
The problem with news is that the quality is crap. It's biased, the headlines are misleading, and there's often no research done ahead of time. Nothing of value will be lost there. But good journalism, research, unbiased headlines... they're getting screwed too. And that makes me sad, because the news is essential for the proper functioning of a democratic society. If we don't know what's going on, if we don't have people willing to get in there to get the full story, not just the press releases... we're screwed.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Everyone thinks the news is free since it's all just a click away. There are lots of great aggregators like Google News, Yahoo, Bing, as well as specialty aggregators like Slashdot.
SOME news is free. Flikr and tweets by passers by are free, but a worldwide professional staff of reporters, editors and publishing infrastructure (either print or online) is expensive to maintain and will not survive years of wholesale freeloading.
Longtime newspaper readers have already noticed a substantial drop in the quality of almost every big major newspaper in the country (except for maybe USA Today, which is the exception that proves the rule) over the past ten years or so. They've all had to let go a large part of their staffs.
So just as people are whining that they don't make pop music the way they used to, so we're starting to see that with the reporting of the news. Yes, there will be plenty of news to read, more than you'll have time to read, but the quality has gone down and will go down further.
He's right -- for community weeklies and even some very small dailies, legal ads are lifeblood.
Much less so for mid-sized-and-larger dailies.
You want to see an incumbent business model act like a pack of pissed-off wolverines? Watch the small-paper lobby go to town when a state legislature suggests that putting legal notices online might -- might! -- be more efficient.
"It was a summer's tale: Just a boy, his Linux, and a head full of dreams..."
Whether we read it on paper on on the screen does not matter. What does matter: "How are we going to support journalism?" . Especially local journalism. Who will cover the zoning board. Who will ferret out corruption? The meetings of the Virginia legislature used to be covered by eight reporters, now it is covered by one. ( From memory, I cannot find the story ).
New Orleans may give us a preview, since there is no shortage of corruption. While the cat's away.....
My brother has worked for some major metro dailies in the Northeast, including as managing editor. He's recently decided to leave the industry at perhaps the peak of his career because he's convinced it's dying.
We discussed it and came to the same conclusion as you. The fundamental problem isn't the business model, it's an apathetic citizenry. If Americans cared deeply about civic issues and governance, rather than American Idol, they would find a way to fund good journalism. But if they don't, there's no business model that can keep good journalism going.
I only hope it takes something less than a national tragedy to re-invigorate the American people's concern for good governance.
It's much harder to do investigative reporting on private companies, as you basically need a whistleblower on the inside in order to get hard facts*. The papers do have "What's your problem" columns where the newspaper steps in to help a consumer being held at the mercy of a company. Of course, if you want an expose on advertisers, that would require funding newspapers entirely on subscriptions in order to remove any appearance of bias.
Also, your Party A/Party B comment shows you don't pay attention. When the newspapers dig up enough dirt on a politician, they become a pariah, and other politicians will want nothing to do with them. Your comment is like saying that because athletes get away with some calls when the ref isn't looking that sports are better off without referees. No, the newspapers aren't going to straighten out politics, but they force politicians to maintain some level of honesty. There have been cases where newspaper investigations have triggered criminal investigations. I agree we're never going to get a clean government, but it's thanks to idiots like you that it is possible to get disasters with names like "Blagojevich" in office. They are not all the same, and they are not all crooks (especially the more local you get).
*Private companies can blow you off a lot easier if you start asking questions, and also will readily sue (retaining lawyers will strain the newspaper's budget). Digging up dirt on the government generally involves public documents and FOIA requests, which makes it easier to build a case and harder for the government to brush it aside.
My webcomic
My local (Gannett owned) paper has always had its biases and whatnot... we can argue about content all day long, BUT they used to have a pretty decent phpbb forum to comment on stories (or whatever people wanted to talk about). The forums were relatively unmoderated unless people became abusive, which allowed a wide range of opinions, for better or worse, to be subjected to debate. About once a year, the forums would get reset and we'd start from scratch.
Well, at one point back in 2007 or 2008, Gannett made the decision to force all of their papers onto Pluck. It was infuriatingly slow, it could be hard to find stories, but obviously, it was meant to give the papers more editorial control over all of their content (it's nice when you can make stories suddenly disappear from memory) but also encouraged them to do it with reader comments. Opinions which differed from the paper's staff, reasonable and polite or not, were deleted. The paper would start "ghosting" users, so that their posts appeared when they were logged in, but nobody else could see them. Readers that agreed with the paper's biases could get away with any amount of abuse of other readers. The editorial staff and executive staff of the paper didn't care, they just let things fester.
Then Gannett made the decision that there was just too much abuse going on in the comments and that it was too much work to keep up with, so they switched to facebook commenting (the reality, based on reading a Gannett insider blog, I get the distinct impression that may be that an exeucitve had pre-IPO stock in facebook, so this could be quite a personal boon as well).
Next thing you know, they were instituting a paywall, requiring a large mandatory subscription increase for paper-only subscribers that have no interest in digital, while simultaneously letting more than two dozen staff members "retire early" and shrinking the paper to a size that you couldn't start a fire with. About the same time, they printed a story on local tax delinquints, only they forgot to disclose that an editor at the paper was himself a delinquint, tried to scrub the posts when a reader posted it and then threatened legal action (ok, "consulting a lawyer about legal action") for libel when the story, along with the link to the state database, spread. A senior editor doesn't know that truth is an absolute defense in a libel/defamation case! And rather than simply admit it, the editor and one of the executives waged an online campaign against the readers before ultimatley hiding the comments.
They just seem determined to shoot themselves in the foot at every opportunity. And Gannett's executives just seem to be milking the company for every little drop they can get out of it along the way.
Stop Koolaid Politics
when they stopped caring about me. When was the last time a story like Watergate broke? When was the last time the papers challenged the powers that be? Sorta hard to do that when the powers that be own you lock stock & barrel. Why would I pay 50 cents/day to read the same corporate drek and propaganda I can get for free in their advertisements?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/