Gunfight at the La Brea Tar Pits
(Media • )
The people who’ve owned America’s biggest newspapers for the past 25 years have always been much better at lobbying for exemptions from law than competing for readers.
Which is why, shortly after most of them reported losing another buttload of readers (the nearby Houston Chronicle shed about 14% of its circulation over the past year, for instance) they got together in a shadowy meeting and decided they all needed to form a cartel and start forcing what few readers they have left to pay for the privilege of visiting the newspaper web sites.
Naturally, they want Congress and the Obama Administration to grant them a magic exemption from anti-trust and price-fixing laws first.
Initially I thought this was one of the very worst ideas I had ever heard of. (For starters, if you publish on the web, you base your ad rates in large part upon the number of people who visit it each day. If you try to force long-time readers to suddenly start paying money to read what you offer, they will find their information elsewhere, your visitorship will go down and your ad rates will be forced to follow.)
But upon days of reflection, I now believe Congress ought to grant them that exemption, because it would lead them to a much quicker, and thus more painless, death. I reached this conclusion because it has become painfully obvious that most of the owners of these big newspapers are greedy, arrogant and completely uninterested in what used to be the main function of that which they own – serving as watchdog for the American public’s interest.
I now think that, although a painful transition period is almost unavoidable, the American public’s interest will be better served if the current crop of big newspaper owners are allowed to fail of their own foolishness, the better for more able and deserving organizations to move in and take their place.
Periodically, when they’re not busy licking their wounds, one or another of the big newspaper publishers will brag about how many millions of page views they receive on their web sites each day. Then, sometimes only minutes later, you’ll hear them launching into a diatribe about how Google is stealing their content and selling ads against it.
Which only makes me think that if Google can successfully sell ads based on a mere list of headlines, shouldn’t newspapers be able to sell even more ads based on a database full of the best local reporting to be had in a given monopoly newspaper market?
Except that the nitwits running America’s big newspaper chains laid off or ran off many of their best local reporters weeks, months or years ago, you know, to cut costs.
Now, according to Moody’s Investors Service, a whopping 14% of big newspapers’ operating costs go to content creation (which is to say, paying reporters and editors). But they are willingly spending five times that much – 70% of their operating costs – on printing, distribution and “corporate functions.” They spend the other 16% on costs associated with selling ads.
Now look, how can you legitimately complain that the search engines are eating your web lunch when you blow all your money distributing a form of your product that no one wants anymore?
What if you split up the 70% you’re now spending pressing ink into tree slices, used some of it to hire back good reporters, some to hire people that know how to make really good and useful web sites, and spend the rest on creative ad people who know good interactive advertising when they see it and understand how to sell it?
Big newspaper publishers (and editors, and columnists) whine all the time about how it just isn’t possible to make enough money for ends to meet based on web advertising. Yet they’ve never made a serious effort at mastering the beast. And guess what? If they weren’t spending 70% of their money running printing presses and burning gasoline to deliver tree slices, they might find that web advertising could pay the freight after all.
That is, if they had the vision to hire people who know how to build good web sites, and the good sense to realize that without all those reporters they just laid off, they are essentially nothing but the third-class coupon mess the mailman pours into my mailbox each week, fortunately on the same day I have to set my trash out for pickup.
But time and again these big newspaper monopolies have proven that they don’t have vision or good sense, and so I think they should be allowed to opt out from price-fixing laws and opt out from the search engines and go ahead and paint themselves with invisible paint.
When I have another 10 minutes to spare, I’ll post the list of web links I will be using with regularity to get all the news and information I’ll ever need – from web site owners who will welcome me as a visitor instead of flogging me like some commodity – if America’s big papers decide to test life behind a “pay wall.”
→ B.Dunn, Jun 08, 2009, 04 59 am
I totally agree with your opinions concerning traditional media being greedy. Having worked most of my life in traditional media, I am finding more and more that the newspapers just don’t see the big picture.
Charging readers for website content will make these dinosaurs extinct even faster…
— Bob Gunner Jun 8, 03:08 pm #
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