ICYMI: Newspapers suck at surviving
Everybody’s talking about (or linking to at least) the latest analysis of the failure of newspapers to be competent. This time, it’s by Bill Wyman, former arts editor of NPR and Salon.com, with a self-professed “too long” piece about “the heart of the collapse of daily journalism.”
He makes a few points my own top editor said to us a few days ago, and which have been repeated over the years: Print circulation costs more than it makes and newspapers got into this pickle partially because they were too comfortable in their monopoly on the method of delivery, yadda yadda yadda. He raps bland features that will never get clicks online because they’re just stories about local people and their hobbies or local charity events.
Skip to part two, with a link provocatively titled “Aren’t reporters partly to blame?” (Get to that in a minute.) I like this anecdote, which shows newspaper managers don’t know how to spend money smartly:
I worked for a nonprofit media company that was in a tough financial spot. An angel swept in and made all the troubles go away. That afternoon, the top newsman at the company got up to address us. “This doesn’t mean you’re all going to get Blackberry’s,” he said. Instead, we hired consultants to tell us what to do with our windfall, and we managers spent with them many hours—many painful hours, days upon days, all of them in rooms filled with people being paid huge sums per hour—we could have better spent doing journalism.
Months later, the consultants gave us our results at a company meeting. Suggestion number one: The staff should get Blackberry’s.
Go to the bottom to his “if I were running a chain of papers” and check out his recommendations.
I don’t get why he blames the reporters for the company not buying new computers or for poor web design or content management or delivery. It’s like, I don’t know, blaming the chef at a Chinese restaurant that doesn’t offer take-out or delivery.
To this day, newspapers still act as if they’re trying to commit suicide. I usually don’t call companies/people out but… Newsday.com? What??? I am not even going to link to it.
