August 11, 2003
What newspapers need…
Tim Porter says newspapers need more than a prayer. They need readers. Now, how do you find new readers in this media environment? I’m certain I do not have any definitive answers. But I do know this: Newspapers could do a better job if they weren’t bled dry by the demand for profit margins above 25 percent made by so many corporate owners (re: The News About the News, by Leonard Downie, Jr. and Robert G. Kaiser).
Posted by acline | August 11, 2003 | Posted in: Main |
Newspapers (as a group) must to adapt to meet the demands of current lifestyles. Also they must adapt to the (relatively) recent changes in the ways that we access the ‘news’.
The demise of the evening newspapers was premature. With the increased commute time and the harried lifestyle prevalent with working Americans, the morning paper sits on the driveway until we return home in the afternoon. By that time, we have already watched the [pictures of the] news on TV at (a rushed) breakfast, listened to the news on the car radio (to and from work), and checked it on the web (or had it pushed to us and displayed on our computer desktops or by email) throughout the working day. When we finally retrieve the newspaper from our driveways and pull off the plastic cover, it’s old news and often obsolete. Is it any wonder that so many of us turn immediately to the comics?
Someday the newspaper publishers will figure this out and bring back the evening editions, perhaps to the demise of many morning editions. Newspapers also need to recognize that their salvation depends on more in-depth reporting that provides substantial background on the stories already covered by TV, radio, and the Internet news services. Their position should be somewhere between TV news (sic.) and the weekly newsmagazines.
Tim Porter says newspapers need more than a prayer. They need readers.
Maybe the problem is that the product, a newspaper, is rapidly becoming obsolescent. Evolve of perish.
Bruce…as a technology, you may be right about paper. Despite what some critics say about the internet (re: Neil Postman), I consider it primarily a text enviornment–only enhanced. That’s not to say it’s without problems
Coupla thoughts:
First, if newspapers continue to think they’re in the newspaper bidness, they’ll suffer the same fate as the railroads, which continued to think they were in the railroad bidness long after they should have recognized they were in the transportation bidness. Newspapers are in the news bidness, and newspaper journalists need to make sure their skills are growing and evolving to the point at which they are adept at selecting and using the most appropriate medium or media to deliver news and information, be it the Web, print or modeling clay.
Re finances (and I’m indebted to Phil Meyer at UNC for a lot of my thinking in this area), the industry’s bidness model is capital-intensive because of the cost of a press, which traditionally has served as a barrier to entry.
But news is freely available (albeit of varying quality, so it’s not quite a commodity) and perishable, two factors that tend to lead to lower profit margins in a free market.
Moreover, in the Web era, that $15 million price tag on a press — a significant barrier to entry — has come down; you can probably charge a Sun server on your credit card and go into the Web news bidness.
For these reasons, news organizations’ bidness models must change. That means lower profit margins because of the labor-intensive nature of producing quality, local journalism. (How low? I don’t know. I know of no magical margin above which good journalism becomes impossible or below which good journalism becomes inevitable.) I’ve seen no evidence that the industry recognizes this, let alone that it is attempting to educate the Wall Street types who exercise so much influence over the industry. Until that happens, the industry, its product and its customers will continue to suffer, with negative consequences for the country.