Will Other Newspapers Follow Into The "3 Days a Week!" Publishing Cycle?

The one's who still want print flyers and coupons are a dying breed. Plus, the people who still get a paper aren't a target demographic.

Get used to the fact newspapers will sink to the level Bleacher Report and Patch, with a bitt of Huffington Post-style posts in there, in how news is treated, with the exception of covering major sports and a few high-profile news beats.

 

OK, if that is true, it begs the question..... why bother to be a journalist anymore?

 

A. There's more to "JOURNALISM!!!!" than working for newspapers.
B. There are many mediums other than newspapers, you know.
C. Newspapers aren't the only venue in which Journalism is practiced.
D. Newspapers are in a death spiral, largely due to the fact they're not the only place people can find news.

 

Of course there's journalism in other places. I mean, you could always start a blog.

 

And here's another thought in that vein:

Why does advertising have to be the vehicle to produce revenue for real journalism in the future anyway? Until online advertising becomes consistently successful, why isn't anyone looking for funding elsewhere?

Voice of San Diego is a perfect example. There's got to be a real journalist or ten in each major metro — might be tougher in smaller areas, but there's no shortage of money, public or private, in cities — with the smarts and who's entrepreneurial enough to go after other sources of funding like VOSD did (they do have some advertising, but most of their money comes from foundation grants and member donations.)

Those can't be the only grants waiting to fund a journalism outlet somewhere. Hell, if someone here can bend the ear of Warren Buffett with the right plan, he'd probably be willing to fund it himself. Maybe Buffett would be willing to set up a foundation specifically to fund journalism outlets like VOSD across the country. Put $20 million in a fund, spread it out to 10 cities, each newsroom gets an operating budget of $1 million for two years, see what happens. And if half are successful — do good work and maybe even add some extra revenue through donations or advertising — then those newsrooms get another two-year renewal, and five new cities get a shot at the program.

I know it's paid the bills of newspapers for a hundred years (and keeps so many here employed), but what's so special about advertising anyway? There are lots of ways to get money ... you just have to find a sucker someone who's willing to give it to you.

 

What's special about advertising is that to date, it's been the only consistently successful method of funding most forms of communications. If grant funding were truly viable right now, you'd see it applied a lot more. Seattle, a town of high income and intellect, did not have anyone step forward with a plan to produce a replacement source of news for the departed P-I (or if they did, it was and is nowhere near as big). Cursory glance at Kickstarer reveals that successful fundings are pegged to very genre-specific publications (two quarterly soccer magazines, for instance, and a lot of books), but no daily news websites or newspapers -- except the Kardashian report, which promises a news feed of nothing but Kardashians. It has $5 pledged as of this morning.

Plus Warren Buffett is in the newspaper-buying business; he didn't get to earning $69 gazillion trillion dollars by funding alternatives to news-gathering organizations that might be on his radar. Any one or any foundation willing to pony up $20 million aren't just throwing it in a good karma hole; they're going to want something out of it, either an investment or a house organ. And a $500,000 annual budget isn't going to get you much headcount. Even if you manage to have zero overhead, you're looking at 10 employees at $50,000 total compensation (benefits and all that too). You'd either need that $20 mil to go into one, maybe two projects, or you'll need a lot more than $20 mil.

I suspect online advertising would be a lot more fruitful had the first wave of ads not poisoned the well. Irritating pop-ups interrupting 56K browsing evolving into malware carriers and mandatory ads before getting to a page (some with autoplay video) has made online advertising a putative exercise. Either a) you have to pay a recurring fee to use the site or you get punished with ads, or b) you download programs specifically to avoid ads. Obviously newspapers and radio don't provide that option, but at least you know the ads are safe and won't show up randomly in the middle of stories or songs. And studies show that most DVR users still watch the shows live, and when they time-shift, they don't bother forwarding through ads.

Despite all that, I suspect you'll have more luck monetizing online ventures through some form of advertising than discovering a new form of funding. There might be a few success stories, but a lot more disappointments.

 

Here's what I've garnered from intense reading of the advertising trades as part of my job. Make of it what you will. ALL media are concerned about the possible demise of the advertising revenue business model. Internet advertising revenue has not replaced lost revenues for any other medium -- the Internet is just too damn big for that.
However, some mass media thought to be almost as dead as newspapers, to wit, the broadcast television networks, have defied predictions of doom and had a significant revival of advertising revenue, because even as it declines in total numbers, their audiences are still large enough to be essential targets for some forms of advertising, like cars, beer, and especially political candidates.
Newspaper audiences may have a similar value because as all surveys show, newspaper ads have a larger impact and retention of information rate than other forms of advertising, and because newspaper readers are a self-selecting elite who are willing to pay for information. Readers, even as circulation declines, have value to some advertisers out there. The trick is identifying those advertisers.

 

Those advertisers aren't going to be chiropractors, podiatrists, and insurance agents, which seem to be the mainstay of print newspaper advertising. You can't also count on those who are older than 50 to be a great advertising demographic.

The discussion of print revenue, though, is beating a dead horse. People still watch TV, but they aren't reading newspapers, nor can they be counted to do that in the future.

 

You do know the P-I still exists as a web-only outlet? Any startup would do pretty much what the P-I is doing now. Keep in mind Seattle still has a daily paper, so there really isn't much of a need for a "savior" to shower millions of dollars on a startup that would have a hard time breaking even.

 

To repeat. ALL media are losing audience. The big cable networks, USA, TNT, etc., are losing viewers in 2012 more rapidly than newspapers are losing readers. But their audiences retain value to advertisers nonetheless. Daily newspapers obviously offer an advantage in marketing products with a specific shelf life, so supermarkets, cultural event promoters, and such seem like good targets for salespeople.
I submit that the undeniable devastation caused by the Internet has done less harm to newspapers as businesses than the fact so many of them are business enterprises which were unprepared for and unable to imagine real competition. If they can't have guaranteed profits, they have no other model but shrink until costs are so low profits are guaranteed again -- even if the profits shrink as well.

 

The P-I is a news aggregator. They have a skeleton crew of "news gatherers" and a couple of producers as an editorial staff. The overwhelming bulk of their content is via wire, news partners or reader submissions. This isn't like the New Orleans/Alabama papers. My Seattle experience is limited to Frasier, coffee, Nintendo, Windows, grunge music and a few days in 2008 during which I may or may not have fed the moose, but from what I can see, the P-I doesn't exist in anything more than a domain name.

Seattle not having a second newspaper/written-driven news content option speaks to the point I was actually making. Seattle functioned with two newspapers for a long time and mourned the P-I deeply when it closed, but nobody was coming in with grants or a business plan that would allow a successor to take shape. And if any major city would do it, based on demographics, I would have bet Seattle. If they can't come up with the next step in the evolution of funding journalism, I don't have a lot of hope that you'll see it take form anywhere else. Perhaps a niche market, but not a daily news source.

 

Don't you think this is where the T-P and Alabama papers are heading?