Wimberley, Tex.: I've watched regional newspapers self-implode over the past four or five years.
One added more pages to the newspaper, then laid off the news staff to I guess pay for the extra pages. But this made the newspaper weaker, not stronger. Who wants to read articles from Timbuktu that local people cannot relate to?
Then after that, they cut back the reporting staff even further. Do they really think readers want more pages of garbage than local reporting?
It should be no surprise newspaper companies want to dump the Chicago Tribune and Miami Herald when newspaper companies run newspapers in a way that doesn't relate to their readers.
Are newspaper companies as dumb as the auto industry in producing products nobody cares about anymore?
Why aren't newspaper companies and their boards smarter in finding ways to connect with their audience? Do you think newspaper companies are going the way of network television -- irrelevant?
Steven Pearlstein: This is a big problem, and one that I think about every day. The newspaper business is in a death cycle, as you indicate, and it needs to find a way to pull out of it. There has been a dramatic deterioration in the quality of the product. The reason, as I see it, is very simple: the only way to produce a good product is for there to be massive consolidation in the industry, so that economies of scale can be achieved. But to date, we cling to these outdated notions that every city of 25,000 people needs its own daily newspaper. Not only can't those papers be very good at delivering a full range of local, national and international news and features, but their existence makes it difficult for even the big metro papers to have enough circulation (scale) to do that. Unfortunately, consolidation takes a long time, especially when so many papers remain in family ownership. So what is going to happen is that you hare going to have a huge amount of destruction of value and waste of talent until things get so bad, and newspaper prices get so low, and so many papers go out of business, that a few successful consolidators can finally come in and create the new model. What is also needed, however, is for the public to finally realize that there is no free lunch, that advertisers are no longer willing or able to pay for the cost of news collection, and that if people want quality news, they are going to have to pay for it just like any other good. If they are willing to pay $2 each morning for a cup of coffee, then they should willing to pay at least that much for a good newspaper.
