Newspapers and the future
I was thinking about newspapers.
I’ve written before that they are incredibly profitable businesses — in the top three or five market sectors in the world, right up there with pharmaceuticals, with an average profit margin of about 20 percent.
That’s huge; petroleum companies (your ExxonMobils and the like) have single-digit profit margins. They make a lot, but they spend a lot. Reporters are cheap.
All that said, newspapers certainly feel like they’re in trouble. Part of that comes from looking down the road. The 18 to 20-somethings that used to read the paper somewhat regularly aren’t interested, and that’s for several reasons worth noting.
1. They can get major news from just about anywhere: CNN, USA Today, ABC, NBC, CBS, and so on. Maybe one will have it a few minutes before another, but in general they all have the same stories. If something explodes, it doesn’t really matter which one you turn to.
2. Mainstream news sources are boring. Really. The style of your typical newspaper is bland, thanks in large part to much of it being written by the wire services. AP news is boring. Sure, it’s got your five Ws, but only rarely does a gem come out. It’s fine for giving people the basic info, but it’s not going to keep ’em coming back.
3. They just don’t care about local news. Despite the continuing efforts of the current administration, things in this country are pretty much just fine. So who cares whether the city council votes to increase the rates of downtown parking meters, or a new store is opening at the mall, or a local company just made a big sale to the military? Answer: Not most young people. If it doesn’t affect them directly, they couldn’t care less. If it does affect them directly, they’ll hear about it from friends. That’s the power of blogs and social networking sites — only one person needs to read about something and it can spread quickly.
Newspapers see this trend, and it worries them. They’re already being clobbered by the Internet left and right: Craigslist decimates classified-ad revenue when it comes to town. Mainstays like real estate and automotive ads are hurting big time, as more customers are turning to the Internet for information, where there are not only viable alternatives, but better ones. Why browse the newspaper for houses that went on the market two days ago, when Realtor.com will have today’s listings? So papers have to lower their ad rates to deal with the competition that didn’t exist a few years ago.
Hate your local paper? Here’s how to hurt it bad: Start an advertising material distribution service — that is, deliver advertising flyers door to door. They go by different names: “Circular distribution services” or “door to door ad delivery.” Check out HMG Distribution.
Companies, especially local grocery stores, pay a mint to the local newspaper to have their materials delivered to subscribers. When an ad distribution service comes to town, they can easily undercut the paper because they have much less overhead. Like Craigslist, these services are a nightmare for newspapers.
Inexpensive mapping technology and easy access to demographic databases means people can offer advertisers a lot more than the local paper does. Newspaper carriers will deliver to their entire circulation area, or possibly break it down into a few ZIP codes. But an independent delivery firm can deliver to everyone, not just subscribers. And they can be much more specific when it comes to neighborhoods.
In short, it’s a trying time for papers. Not that we didn’t know that.
So newspapers are scrambling to remain relevant. They see competition from all over, but so often get it wrong why these things are competition.
Bloggers, for example, are certainly not competition because they’re better journalists. Sure, some of them are very good journalists, but by and large the blogging community relies on mainstream journalists to do most of the work for them.
Bloggers are competition because they understand what newspapers don’t: Bland, opinionless copy doesn’t sell. Newspapers put their collective nose up and say that true journalism must be objective. Which is fine and good … but it doesn’t get you readers.
That’s for two reasons. First, it’s boring. It’s dry and featureless. The unwritten policy of too many papers is “Never offend anyone,” so scared are they of getting angry letters or of losing some readers. (In fact, almost all people who cancel their subscriptions in a huff renew them fairly quickly.)
Secondly, too many papers equate “objective” with “equal” — that is, they’re happy to give you both sides of a story, but they don’t bother to tell you which one has the facts behind it. It’s more important to be balanced than to be informative. Creationists have learned to take advantage of this by enlisting the media to help present its arguments. Afraid to appear to take sides, much of the mainstream media treats evolution and creationism as if there’s equal weight to both sides.
In fact, the scientific support is so far to one side as to make it laughable that people think there’s a controversy.
So you often get the media quoting celebrities or religious leaders or “men on the street” and other know-nothings to support one “side” of an argument, whatever that argument is, in the name of balance.
Bloggers toss this out the window. So does Fox News. So do many magazines. They’re willing to give an opinion — to take sides and tell you X is right, Y is wrong. And they don’t care if they offend anyone.
And people eat it up.
Newspapers have regular readers. Magazines have loyal readers. Bloggers and columnists — think Keith Olbermann or Bill O’Reilly — have fanatics.
Newspapers just don’t get it. Instead, they focus on particular demographics (“women with children in the home” is the new target for the Roanoke Times, for example), or they throw all sorts of multimedia out there. (“They aren’t just photos — it’s a slide show! With music!) And people just aren’t interested.
Newspapers are going to be around for a while because they still do the best journalism out there. But they’re going to have to realize that what they’ve been offering all along was fine once upon a time, but in this new world people have seen alternatives, and newspapers are looking downright stodgy.
Anonymous says:
Given the print medium how can a newspaper ever be closer than a few hours behind? I love your analysis on this topic, especially since you are on the inside. I may be stodgy myself, but I can’t imagine a morning without my paper. I don’t care if it’s a great one or a crappy one, I want the paper on the po’ch in the mo’nin’ (forgive me, I’m listening to 50 Cent, so I had to make up some contractions).
I grew up in a town with an independent paper that was taken over by Gannett about 15 years ago. When I go home and read it now, it’s USA Today light with a local section added. Don’t get me wrong, I love USA Today because it’s full of charts and maps and graphs. Love it. Especially when I’m traveling and it’s right there outside my hotel room door. Oddly, though, I always go right to the Virginia and New York snippets they have on the back of the front section.
That’s why I hope the local paper never goes away. Interesting how the celebrity news crept up to page 2 of the Roanoke Times, but I guess that just a sign of the times, right?
We went to the beach with some D.C. friends a few weeks ago. They went out and grabbed a Washington Post and a NY Times each morning. We were slavering over them like we hadn’t read in years. They are still powerhouses, and probably always will be, but I still like the local rags, and the voices in them that can come through more clearly than over the wire.