For those who've left the biz

I don't blame the "suits" for the actual demise of the industry. I blame them for hastening it by getting rid of anything resembling quality control.

If one was trying to slow the demise of any industry, "make the product infinitely worse" is just about the last thing you should try, not the first and only thing.

 

If you're a fan of the local team, in order to read the local paper, you would expect something to be in there that nobody can find on ESPN, CBS Sports, SI.com or any of the other national sites.

With a couple notable exceptions (John McClain, Bob McGinn), with most NFL teams do not have their best beat writer at the local paper. There are a few others, but those were the first two I thought of.

If I want to read about the Bears, I go to ESPN Chicago. If I want to read about the Cowboys, I go to ESPN Dallas.

But seven years ago, if you wanted the best NFL coverage of the local team, you picked up the Sunday paper. Some papers had 20-30 pages of coverage, news, features, notes columns, regular columns, picks, roster breakdowns and just about anything a local fan could want.

There are a few exceptions, but in most cases, if you want top coverage, you don't go the local paper. That's sad, but it's reality.

 

Keeping "quality control" at "quality control" expenses while operating with a 50 percent decline in revenue (largely due to the loss of classifieds) would have resulted in many places simply closing their doors --- and thus would have hastened their demise much quicker.

We didn't want to believe this 5-6 years ago. But the Orange County Register disaster showed us otherwise.

 

And it's not just the loss of classifieds. I know we journos usually ignore them, but next time you grab a print edition, look at the "ROP" ads (what few there are). Very, very few of them will be targeted at anyone younger than 60.

That's what strikes me the most when I travel to, say, Portland or Seattle and look through an average weekday edition of their print editions. The large, general population ads from department stores, car dealers, etc. are all gone. Both the news and sports sections are wide open with very little advertising.

 

When I started work in South Florida, the classifieds not only had their own section, but it was the fattest section in the paper. 30-36 pages. The Saturday section was almost as big as the Sunday section, thanks to real estate and auto advertising.

Yesterday's paper at my current shop at 8 columns of classifieds (a page and a quarter).

 

So keeping the doors open and sucking up what's left of the revenue is more important than putting out a quality product that people actually want to pay for?

I mean, I agree that there's no real viable solution to overcome the loss of classified and advertising revenue, but you're basically arguing that putting out a shitty product and bleeding the stone dry is better than just blowing the whole thing up. Which I disagree with.

 

Most of the people in my neighborhood (25-30 houses) are in their late 30s to early 50s and all but a couple have lived in the neighborhood for 7-10 years. We've been in the same house for a decade.

When we moved to this house in 2004, everybody got the paper. I'd watch the delivery guy do the neighborhood by foot because it was every single house.

Now, one person gets it. I seriously doubt it's because they're reading it for free online. I think it's become more of an issue of, "Why would I need to get the paper?"

 

Yeah, I guess I am.

People are still employed. That's better than the alternative. The product is worse overall than before, but worse doesn't have to mean shitty any more than a former Super Bowl team who goes 9-7 is a shitty team. It's just not as good.

 

Readers of the major metro down the road from me used to be able to count on two types of ads, without fail, in the sports section: (A) tire store ads, and (B) "sex" ads from strip clubs, massage parlors, escort services, etc. Now, even those ads are gone.

 

I blame the "suits" for not having the foresight, to use your analogy, to put some of the vinyl record profits towards the 8-track industry (and then cassettes, CDs, digital etc.) while the current product was gigantically profitable.

Instead, we had constant talk about how the product survived all the other challenges and that we should give a new nickname for the newsroom.

That's what I blame them for. Or to use another analogy, take the buggy whip profits and start hiring some auto designers, in, oh, 1910 or so.

 

I see your point. Though I think that the "suits" did not have the skills. What newspapers offered were large audiences in a market that were thought be difficult or impossible to duplicate. So it was just going to be a matter of moving the advertisers to on-line over time.

But what happened is that with the internet competitors to newspapers could offer more targeted audiences. This lead to a supply glut and newspapers have not been able to geenrate significant increases in on-line revenue.

There was an article in Fortune last May about Yahoo. It was generally agreed that Yahoo's business model was dead because they were to tied to aggregating mass audiences (the bull case for Yahoo is their interest in a Chinese internet company and their status as a leading search provider in Japan). I said to myself if Yahoo does not have the managerial skills and product to survue how do Gannett, McClatchey, Tribune et. al have a chance?

 

You see, that's so easy to say in the abstract but really makes no sense.

Just because you happen to be in the buggy business does not mean you have the knowledge or capital or resources to turn this business into something completely revolutionary that makes a different product with different parts suppliers and a completely different skill set.
I mean, why not blame the kerosene lamp and candle makers for not having the "foresight" to invent the light bulb? Not being a genius does not mean you are a bumbling idiot. Sometimes businesses just reach the end of their useful lives.