The Paper of 2018

I was just checking out Scout.com because of one of the jobs in the job board and it looks like Scout.com is doing great as an online sports network with sites dedicated to specific colleges and professional team. Now if they can do well with sports information being available everywhere, why would you pay scout or rivals for the information?

I think it has something to do with indepth analysis that they are not getting from yahoo sports, enter city newspaper here FSN, ESPN etc.

Now why can't the LA Times, NY Post, LV Review Journal take a hint from them? I know the NY Times and Wall Street Journal used to do it.

Do you think more papers and or media organizations will add the pay wall again later or will it be to late by then?

 

Yahoo! spent $30 quadrillion and bought Rivals. Fox owns Scout.com
Money is made in advertising, not subscription. Been that way forever, will remain that way till I hit my last keystroke.

Well, there are a few big ones doing it. They're doing it now, and they're doing it at the cost of their newspaper newsroom, foreign bureaus and national coverage. But, they're doing it. Yet, they're still behind the curve.
We need these entities to succeed. They are the wages that pay. Living wages. Scout.com. Rival.com. Those are very low paying positions. Often part time. We need journalism jobs. Not notebook compilation positions.

 

In some places, yes. But, at the risk of outing myself, the paper I work for made upwards of $50 million this year (that's profit). And still we had a round of layoffs and buyouts.

Why not take some of that profit and re-invest it in the product, instead of taking steps to make the product worse?

 

Because many on Wall Street (who own us) aren't interested in long-term profits, nor are they particularly confident about the prospect of long-term profits no matter what newspapers do to "reinvent" themselves.
So it's maximize the short-term profit, then dump and run.
With a little luck, we'll all be privately held by 2018. In some places it'll be better, in some probably worse, but at least it gives newspaper owners the option of caring about their product, instead of having to choose between their product and their shareholders, a choice the product almost always loses.

 

Should have mentioned, I don't work for a publicly traded company, either. We're not owned by Wall Street.

 

Well, then, I guess your paper's just got greedy ownership (or maybe ownership that went too far into debt to buy it). That's sure a problem, too.

 

There is only one ownership Some Guy could be talking about.
His owner, and the mother before him, have long been good owners and stewards of journalism. Sure, they're quirky. But, they paid their employees a fair wage and competed when competition presented.
Hopefully, their plan is to reinvest. If not, it's a loss of another journalism trust along with the Chandlers and Bancrofts.

 

Have a look at this:

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20080125/papers_online_080125/20080125?hub=SciTech

 

This is why I abhor the "newspapers are making 25% profit" today argument.

 

There is a rumor out there that one major city is on the verge of becoming the first to not have a paper. If the rumor is true, and I think it is, it will happen within the next year...

I guarantee you papers are going to be folding left and right in the next couple years...

 

It may not necessarily be a bad thing that a lot of the current papers will die out. The great hope for the future in the industry seems to be that online revenues will supplant print revenues as their main bread basket. The problem is that they are still hoping to keep afloat outdated profit expectations by simply substituting one source of revenue for another. However, given how fragmented online advertising is and the amount of competition out there for online advertising dollars, I doubt that online revenues will ever be enough to satisfy the current profit demands of newspaper companies. And given the way these companies are operating, it just seems unlikely that we'd see an industry-wide shift from that mentality.

So perhaps what we need is for the current newspaper industry and its outdated business model to go extinct, which would open up the daily local news reporting niche for new news-gathering companies to move in. These would be companies that produce primarily an online product on a 24-hour news cycle, with perhaps a weekly companion print product (with distinctly different content from the online product) that people can subscribe to. As such, their business model will be built around online revenues, with corresponding profit expectations. They would likely start relatively small, and then grow as much as their online revenues would allow them to, which means they'll likely always be smaller than some of today's behemoth newspaper operations. Such limitations on staff size would mean that most of these companies would have to focus exclusively on local news, which is fine because national or broad regional news will have never been a part of their product anyway (there will still be a few operations that concentrate on national/regional news). For example, they would never feel the need to dedicate manpower or resources to posting every MLB boxscore, nor will their readers expect that when they go to these news sites. In addition, the smaller staff of each operation can be offset by the fact that there could be more than one such operation for each city. The smaller staff size, smaller start-up cost (zero or little newsprint cost), and newly opened market niche would make this easier, and it would bring back some of the competition that has been lost in one-paper towns, increasing and improving the coverage that readers get.

Would this become the norm by 2018? I don't think so. It'll take longer than that for the current business model to bleed newspapers dry. By 2018, I think there will be few multi-newspaper cities, but perhaps not significantly fewer newspapers yet. However, newspapers' staff size and quality will continue to decline as long as the current model remains, and in some places by 2018, that will probably open the door for some of the "new" news-gathering companies I described to find a foothold and wait for the bleeding behemoth to topple over and die.

 

Papers in 2018 will only have managers...

Everyone else will have had their jobs eliminated due to budget cuts...