Yesterday a reader sent me an e-mail asking for my opinion about the Tribune Company’s recent troubles. The fact is that bankruptcy isn’t the end of the line for the Tribune Company, but it does significantly change the game.
If you check out Steve Chapman’s take over at the Chicago Tribune, you’ll find one of the golden nuggets in this market transition:
It’s our job as journalists to provide something people want in a form that they want and are willing to pay for. If we can’t, we deserve our fate. But I hold out hope that we can.
The current recession is doing a lot to hurt newspapers with already shaky financial foundations. The timing couldn’t be worse. But that doesn’t mean that news isn’t a profitable enterprise.
Everyone will be watching the Tribune Company closely as reorganization plans begin to take shape. If they are lucky, smart, or both, they can still come out of this as a profitable company.
As I look around at many struggling papers, I can almost universally recommend two things that would make worlds of difference:
- Trim the fat and promote the meat – many newspapers are bloated as a result of many years with high margins. This is happening all over the place with layoffs and attrition, but unfortunately the wrong people are leaving…for better jobs.
- Invest heavily in your technical team – if you were building a new print product, you’d probably spend some time picking the right press, hiring a good layout team, and attending to a million other quality control items. Why is it OK to globally represent your brand with one developer and four people who wouldn’t know HTML if it hit them in the face?
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Jason,
It’s difficult to understand why brick-and-mortar publishers continue to ignore the realities of an internet connected world. Content is now a commodity business. Readers can get as much as they want for FREE. Watching newspapers fold is like watching seagulls die because they have forgotten how to fish. Monopolizing a local/regional market, because you’re the only one with a printing press, is no longer a viable business model. Today, readers want to experience news in a way that’s relevant to their lifestyle needs over time, which may not involve ink on paper. If newspapers want to survive, they need to change their distribution model to digital first, print second. In today’s world, a scoop is what goes up on the internet minutes after something happens. Readers that are willing to wait for a news item to print in the morning edition could continue to have that option, but everybody reading online would get the story first. Instead of pretending to be national in scope, via API and Reuters, newspapers could get back to their roots as local/regional entities, with staffs that reflect the economic realities of digital publishing. Online, there should be no shortage of advertisers willing to place ads alongside quality content. Newspapers would do well to adopt the advertising tactics of successful bloggers.
Well said.