ON DEALING WITH "TOO MANY JOURNALISTS"

BITTER MEDICINE

Jeff Jarvis has an interesting post today titled "Too many journalists", where he recounts a recent experience on an industry panel:

"...sitting on another darned panel yesterday, Chrystia Freeland, ME of the FT in the US, said it better than I have.

We were singing two-party harmony as I wondered why every newspaper needs a movie critic when the movies aren’t local and she questioned the need for the Miami Herald to have its own Moscow bureau — back in the heyday when she was reporting there herself — to get that apparently unique Miami view of the USSR. Then she said that news is “an industry with a lot of oversupply that is now exposed.”

Then his readers chimed in with some terrific supplementary comments like this one by peter:

"These words from Crains Chicago Business on 7/7:

“The Baltimore Sun will close its South Africa and Moscow bureaus within 18 months, Editor Tim Franklin said Thursday. He said dramatic industry changes - led by the availability of international news online - had sparked the restructuring of overseas coverage.”

And my favorite by Claude B.:

"Take the NYT for example. Do you know how a page is designed ? An art director puts the page together with Quark or In design. Then he prints the page. Then he gives the printed page to a “paginator”. Not the digital file… too simple, the piece of paper. Then the paginator builds the page again based on the design. Then the art director seats next to the paginator to correct the page.

So to make it simple, they build the page twice… and that for, if I remember well, the entire newspaper."

These anecdotes are unfortunately plentiful, but the solution to these problems for newspapers are no less painful. 

Jeff's solution in his post, as one would expect, calls for a lot less investment in "old-style" reporters with beats, and a lot more investment in local online reporting and coverage.

But as I recounted in a post back in March, every paper is going to have to find it's own solution:

"The answer may vary from community to community in the US, with some papers hanging on with diminished staffs and ambitions, some going to web-based only versions, and some seeing their prominent reporters supplement their incomes off web-based blogs and services."

The one thing that all these solutions have in common though, it they typically call for a newspaper company to get a lot smaller in size, revenues and profits, before they can start growing to be big again.  And that's a lot less palatable for managers, employees, and shareholders.

Just look at the recent second quarter results from the New York Times itself a few days ago.  The company reported total revenues of:

"Total revenues rose 1.6 percent to $858.7 million compared with $845.1 million. Advertising revenues grew 1.0 percent, circulation revenues were up 0.6 percent and other revenues increased 12.6 percent."

Among the "other revenues" of course, were the online operations, which grew a lot faster:

"In the second quarter, the Company's Internet-related businesses generated $66.1 million in revenue, up from $49.0 million. Internet-related businesses include our digital archives, the Web sites of our newspapers and broadcast properties, and About.com."

But they were a relatively small, albeit growing piece of the total revenues:

"In total, Internet businesses accounted for about 7.7 percent of the Company's revenues in the second quarter versus 5.8 percent in the same quarter a year ago."

So, there aren't any fast-acting, silver-bullet solutions for newspapers.

Just, slow, painful evolution to a "right-sized" organization and business model.

Like industries have done in the face of technology-driven change for countless years.

Comments

[Ryan]

The one thing that all these solutions have in common though, it they typically call for a newspaper company to get a lot smaller in size, revenues and profits, before they can start growing to be big again. And that's a lot less palatable for managers, employees, and shareholders.

I think so!

[Allison]

That's great!!

[Emily]

Good post!!

[Jim Bursch]

The difference between the "right sizing" of media (newspapers are just the beginning) and other industries is that other industries don't have the big mouth that media has.

Unlike, say, the steel industry, the media industry is going to tell us incessantly about the horrors and agonies of change -- because it can.

There is going to be a whole lotta bitching and moaning before this adjustment is done.

At MyMindshare, we are doing our part to move it along by taking aim at the ad-supported media business model, which we believe is fundamentally corrupt.