For the past several hours I've been digesting the news about the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News decision to limit daily newspaper delivery and move to an online delivery program.While I understand the desperation and the gloom of the impending journalistic train wreck, it just seems that almost universally the brains who run newspaper organizations are, well, without brains.
From what I understand, even in today's plunging market, the only part of any newspaper's operation that is making real money is the print side. Oh sure, managers brag about the number of hits and page views, but what they don't mention is how that relates to incoming revenue.
So on the one hand, the Free Press and Detroit News have it right, the product is news and to the extent you can save your news gathering organization you can still market that side of it. But going to mostly online begs the question of how that will make more money.
I see where the online edition will cost $12 a month and will come to readers in a printable format. So now, we're giving people the newspaper, but making them print it at home. Sounds a little like going to Burger King where they will supply the meat patty, but you have to bring the bun and condiments and still pay the same price for the burger.
It may not take long for some sharp blogger to figure out how to take the online version and then distribute to an e-mail list of their own for free or a much cheaper price. Articles will be ripped off, copied and distributed as they are now.
People are too used to getting their online news for free and I don't see a lot of people willing to pony up the new online subscription rate. But again, at least the Freep and Detroit News are trying to keep the main thing, the main thing.
Besides when I go out to breakfast, I don't want to take my laptop with me to try and run through computer pages while I eat.
Then you have the Booth model. The one that says, people don't care what's in the paper or who gets the news so you eviscerate the news gathering staff and lean on the same poor, incompetent leadership that brought you to this point. This is the model I really don't understand.
Imagine an airline that had one airline cockpit crew that every time they were assigned a flight it crash landed and everyone but the crew was lost. At some point you would think that the CEOs of that airline would say, I think the flight crew may be the problem and not the passengers.
But Booth is taking off on a new flight, but again with the same flight crew that brought down the plane the last time. Someone smarter than I said you can't keep doing the same thing over and over and expect different results.
Then you have the Journal Register Co. model that plans to replace much of the reporting staff with hobby journalists working for free. Sort of like a car repair garage turning over its business to a bunch of weekend car warriors.
Everyone thinks they can do another person's job better than they can (just ask any football or baseball coach) but despite what people think, doing a reporter or editor's job is not as easy as it looks and requires a certain skill set. So turning over the steering wheel of a newspaper to an unlicensed, underage driver is really insane.
But all this flailing around is a product of having incompetent people at the top who are more concerned about keeping their jobs than improving the product. With the obvious impact their incompetence is having on many decent young people with careers on the line, I frankly don't know how they sleep at night.
The one thing all three models have in common is they are blowing a big kiss-off to the biggest group of their loyal readers, the ones who have bought and purchased their dead tree product for years. They are consciously writing off a large, profitable segment of their readership without a clue as to how to attract the young readers they desire and need.
Who knew that the eventually newspaper model would be for the newspaper to be the one to cancel the subscriptions of loyal readers. All of this looks like a strange way to throw in the towel.
2 comments:
Jim:
My father-in-law, et al, said that for years GM would handle a hopelessly-incompetent employee by promoting them into management.
Do you think this is also the source of the problem that plagues the newspaper industry? Putting morons in charge can't be good for business. Kind of like that commercial where that frizzy-haired kid serving as interim CEO says "Dude, I am SO psyched!" at a press conference, prompting all the stockholders to call their brokers and scream, "SELL!!!!!"
Newspapers awakened to the Internet threat far too late, much in the same way the U.S. auto companies didn't take the threat of competition from Japanese automakers seriously until those companies had taken big chunks of market share out of their hides.
Newspapers had near-monopoly power in their markets, especially in ones like Grand Rapids and Flint, for decades. Companies in that comfortable situation find it difficult to respond to a competitive business environment.
As a Boothie, I've very much appreciated the company's lifelong employment policy. But I think it has also bred a sense of complacency in the whole company. Why worry about trying to do your best every day when about the only way you can get fired is to plagiarize someone else's work or surf for porn on your office computer? Booth has many fine journalists, but the company's pateralistic management style has created some dead wood and a lack of urgency to respond to change.
I also credit Booth for doing whatever it can in trying to preserve daily publication of its papers in a horrible economic environment. Yes, I think that newspapers in their printed form are going away eventually. But I suspect the median age of a Booth newspaper reader is higher than that of a Free Press or News reader. Many of those readers don't have access to a computer or won't read newspapers online. So cutting back to home delivery three days a week, as the Freep and News are doing, would likely be disastrous for Booth.
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