Poynter: News companies only halfway through free fall

http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=123&aid=152618

 

shit.

 

Anyone got a Manhattan? Shit, at this rate I'll take 10.

 

If I'm a newspaper company, I start targeting for a 5 percent profit right now.

 

I don't see how some companies can pull out of it. Profits are cut, so employees are let go and newshole is shrunk, so product quality suffers, so circulation plunges, so profits are cut, so employees are let go, etc., etc. It becomes a self-licking ice-cream cone of fail that ends in oblivion.

 

There was a story today that said the New York Times might consider selling assets (i.e. other papers) to help reduce debt. Selling the Boston Globe would be great for NYT Co., but who would buy it?

 

They save the real news for the end ...

"Ultimately, we believe that newspaper publishers will re-emerge as healthy players in the local media marketplace, but with margins significantly below the 20 percent-plus levels the industry historically has enjoyed."

That's it. Quit being so f-in greedy.

 

Every time I mention this "20% profit margin" number to friends or family who aren't in the industry, they think it's bitchy hyperbole on my part. Because no business that's not absolutely raping its bottom line could possibly do that figure. As I understand, most proper businesses think they're coming out pretty good if they're making 5-10%. Hell, most seem happy just to be running in the black.

It's the Internet. It's "changing demographics." It's the price of gas, of paper, of good reporting.

I'm not saying all that's irrelevant. But it feels like a smoke-screen to avert people's attention from the fact that these companies were squeezing out outrageous, unsustainable profits in the 1990s, wasted that money and invested exactly none of it in the technology, training or distribution changes that might've made this decade a little easier. If you spend a night lighting cigars with $100 bills, I'm not going to cry when you claim to have no money.

 

nothing more need be said

 

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