morning lineup firegeezer on 25 Jun 2008 07:36 am
Morning Lineup - June 25
When we left off yesterday (HERE), we had pointed out that many, if not most of the print newspapers are terminally ill from hemorrhaging revenues. While the San Francisco Chronicle is losing $1 million a week, the San Jose Mercury News is actually gaining a larger readership through its online delivery.
So what will the next few years bring in the way of newspaper operations? Obviously, a lot of them will be going out of business. The Chronicle is in a death spiral. The future is clearly to be found in the digital delivery systems, namely the internet and television.
Many newspapers have wisely chosen to embrace this shift and are working on making their websites ultimately become their primary edition. The Washington Post, Houston Chronicle, Philadelphia Enquirer/Daily News are good examples of this.
Others that insist on clinging on to the paper-based delivery will start cutting back to 3, 4, or 5 days a week publications. Small-town papers will be merging or bought out by regional servers who will combine the local news resources of an area into one website tailored to a specific region. And a lot of them will just plain disappear.
Once the advertising leaves, that’s it. Los Angeles is the world’s capital of the movie-making industry. Two years ago the LAT was rocked when the movie-makers themselves cut back on their newspaper advertising by half. They can post video trailers on the ‘net for next to nothing.
Participants at a conference on the Future of Journalism this past weekend at Harvard Univ. heard one speaker tell them that news organizations should abandon their “all you can eat buffet” offerings of mediocre coverage of all subjects and instead, they should provide higher quality news for smaller audiences. They were also told that the mainstream media must embrace — not fight — the blogosphere and that serious reporting can survive by catering to niche audiences.
But you already knew that, didn’t you? That’s why you have all those Blogs sitting in your Favorites folder.
Ok, let’s get this equipment checked out, Trend-setters. I’m going to start some coffee.
on 25 Jun 2008 at 9:42 am 1.Ken said …
Newspapers have been slowly dying for years. My dad work in layout and composing at a large paper for here in CT for 30 years. When he started there were about 150 people on three shifts, 7 days a week. His old department is now three people.
Interesting article about the Orange County Register outsourcing editing to India http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D91GQIK80.htm
on 27 Jun 2008 at 8:59 pm 2.Dal90 said …
The Worcester T&G and I presume Boston Globe outsourced their internal accounting functions to India a couple years ago.
I’m sure the managers trying to straighten out book keeping issues just love dealing with Apho over the phone instead of walking upstairs. I know enough about both organizations to make an informed guess the Globe saved a lot, but the T&G operations would’ve cost more to outsource. Economies of scale, eh?
Although the copy editing to proof read is intriquing. God knows it hasn’t been done in years properly here.
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Not all job cuts are circulation related. It simply takes a fraction of the staff to do the work now thanks to increasing automation.
Even in 2000 the T&G was still put together, mostly, by Cut-n-Paste. I’m not talking CTRL-C, CTRL-V — I’m talking exacto knives, bottles of paste, and grid paper. The completed pages where imaged and transmitted to the printing plant using a very fancy fax machine.
That’s all computerized now.
In the late 1970s it took three times as many workers to produce a single edition…now that smaller staff handle five editions with much more diverisity in advertising and such, plus a quarterly magazine!