Merry Christmas, Mofo
(Media)
This kind of sums up the flavor of why I quit working for newspapers after 19 years or so.
MediaNews Group, the reader may recall, is the company controlled by Dean Singleton who perpetrated, among other acts, the slaughter of more than 1,000 jobs via the closing down of the Houston Post back in 1995.
Some people argue that he’s a kinder, gentler soul these days. I don’t know, maybe this will help you decide. It was (no fooling) posted on the outside door of the men’s room in the newsroom of the (Orange County, Calif.) Daily Breeze on Christmas Eve:
“December 24, 2008Dear MediaNews Group Retirement/Savings Plan Participants:
All of you are aware of the unprecedented challenges American businesses, and more specifically the newspaper industry, are facing today. MediaNews Group is not immune from these difficulties nor is it exempt from having to make hard business decisions. In an effort to operate our business as cost effectively as possible, the Company has made the decision to suspend all Company contributions and matches to the 401K Plan for 2009.
With your support and continued efforts, I am hopeful that we can resume the Company contributions in 2010.
Thank you for your understanding.
Sincerely,
Charles M. Kamen
VP Human Resources”
Personally, I wouldn’t bet the farm on a happy MediaNews 2010.
→ B.Dunn, Dec 30, 2008, 07 15 pm
No Bailout for the Dead
(Media)
In an era in which the ultimate reward for management incompetence seems to be a big, fat bonus courtesy of your buddies on the board of directors, an uncomfortable hour in front of a congressional committee and, with luck and the right connections, a few billion in bailout lucre…there will be none of that for the newspaper industry.
Instead, I expect a string of Chapter 11 bankruptcies such as the one real estate developer Sam Zell and the board of Tribune Co. filed yesterday.
It took Zell less than a year to take ownership over the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and the company’s other 10 newspapers and 23 TV stations before putting the company into bankruptcy and likely selling it off in pieces. Keeping the good stuff, he told newsroom employees the Chicago Cubs weren’t part of the bankruptcy deal.
But it’s unfair to infer that that’s what happens when a real estate developer tries to run a newspaper. After all, the big conglomerates and media chains that now own virtually all of America’s big and mid-sized newspapers and broadcast media outlets have managed for many years to muck things up, and now they’re reaping their insightful management harvest. For Instance:
→ The New York Times Co. reported on Monday that it essentially wants to take out a $225 million home equity loan on its headquarters building in Manhattan, “to ease a potential cash flow squeeze” whose cause can be traced to dwindling ad revenue, which was down more than 17% in October.
→ The Wall Street Journal reports that 20% of newspapers are now “in financial distress,” and newspaper chains including McClatchy, Lee Enterprises, the Journal-Register, MediaNews Group and Freedom Communications are all carrying a big honkin’ load of debt compared to their shrinking profits.
→ As for the Journal itself, Pali Capitol Inc. estimates that it and the rest of News Corp. newspapers will see operating income drop by almost 37% in 2009, prompting Pali analyst Richard Greenfield to conclude that Rupert Murdoch’s company “would have created more value for investors by donating $5.7 billion to charity” instead of buying Wall Street Journal owner Dow Jones.
→ E.W. Scripps has announced it wants to sell the Rocky Mountain News, but Dean Singleton, who publishes the Denver Post and whose MediaNews Group is Scripps’ partner in a Denver joint operating agreement, basically said the News sucks wind so badly no one is going to buy it and instead, it will close up after 149 years.
→ The American Press Institute held a summit last month in which newspaper owners concluded they had steered their way into a “full-blown crisis,” according to Editor & Publisher, and won’t be able to get back onto the road without “outside help,” which sounds like code words for taxpayer bailout money, which I would translate to “fat chance.”
To his credit, Northwestern University business professor James Shein, speaking before the API newspaper publishers declared “the biggest hurdles to progress: The industry’s senior leadership, including some people in this room,”
I think one of those hurdles is Singleton, who says there’s enough profit to be made in Denver for one newspaper, but not two. He and other media observers and consultants seem to think the industry still hasn’t sufficiently consolidated yet, and that fewer companies need to own more of what used to be America’s voice in order for the industry to stabilize.
I, on the other hand, think consolidation has a lot to do with what killed the industry in the first place. That and a continued failure to heartily embrace the Internet, where newspapers’ real competitors have heartily been eating the newspapers’ lunches for years.
Beginning decades ago, the Federal Trade Commission stopped caring very much about corporations creating news monopolies. Almost immediately, in historical terms, companies such as Gannet and McClatchy and the Thompson chain started buying up newspapers and TV stations and turning them into one-size-fits-all cookie cutters in order to save money and, for a while, increase profits.
Suddenly cities whose readers had supported two or three newspapers were left with one per market. And in most cases, that one looked pretty much like McSame EveryPaper. No more competition to get the lastest corruption scandal on the front page. No more investigative reporting. No more business sections. Plenty more happy features and “good” news, though.
The readers were not fooled, and dropped their subscriptions to these pale pretenders of yesterday’s newspapers, in droves.
That began in the 1980s and ’90s, and it’s been all downhill since then for the carcass of what used to be the newspaper industry.
While the captains of the newspaper world were trying to get readers to accept canned wire service features in place of local news, the advent of the Internet allowed anyone who was really good at producing news on any particular topic to start up his or her own printing press for $500 or less a year.
Which is why Craig Newmark was able to start up craigslist and use it to steal away probably 35% or more of America’s classified advertising market share.
Shed tears for the editors and reporters who dedicate or, mostly, dedicated themselves to pulling the covers off of corrupt government and business officials and served as the eyes and ears of the public, sure.
But don’t shed any tears for the caretaker publishers who serve at the pleasure of a bunch of absentee board directors and vampire corporate managers who are expert at draining the golden eggs from a goose over the course of a few years but have no idea (or inclination) how to serve the public and keep a business venture going simultaneously over the long haul.
There will be no bailout for the newspaper industry because it went into an irreversible coma 10 years ago or more. Unless there’s an instant rush to follow the Christian Science Monitor, and a whole lot of luck, all that’s going to be left of the newspaper industry is a bunch of unfinished funeral arrangements.
→ B.Dunn, Dec 09, 2008, 05 13 am
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Integrating The News Into Your Life
(Media)
I’ve been thinking a lot about the processes behind creating The News, whether the final product is useful to my life and those of my friends and neighbors, and how to make it more so.
When I was a kid growing up in Kent, Ohio, my folks subscribed to three newspapers.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer came out in the mornings, and gave the big picture filtered through its big-city perspective. Like many large papers in the 1960s and ’70s, it was packed with pages and full of news, at least until the demise of its major competition, the Cleveland Press, which died in 1982.
The Akron Beacon-Journal came out in the afternoons, an oddity for a fairly large-circulation paper. A few years after the Press’s demise, the Beacon switched to mornings. But when I was growing up, it represented an independent take on many of the pronouncements from the Cleveland paper. The later deadline gave its reporters time to one-up stories of regional interest. Then the Plain Dealer would do the same the next morning. And opinion columnists at both papers would take great pains to deflate or reshape each other’s points of view. The competition among papers, while it lasted, was great for the reader because the differing viewpoints allowed us to see stories from more than one side. Issues became 3-D instead of one-sided and flat.
The afternoon also brought us the Record-Courier, a strictly local paper serving mostly Kent and Ravenna, and to a lesser extent the rest of Portage County. It was a typical small, family-run American newspaper: run on the cheap, paying reporters pretty paltry wages, with the sort of results you’d expect. The occasional decent reporter would leave for greener pastures before long, leaving inexperience in his or her wake.
You got to find out a lot about who had come to visit the old-money families the paper’s owners thought were important enough to dominate the “society” pages, and you got a flavor for the nuts-and-bolts city and county governmental meetings, although not many details from the back rooms where real decisions were made.
Because there was no local competition, issues were rather one-sided and flat, as far as the reader was concerned.
TV news was the place to go for national and international news, which you watched at 6 or 7 in the evenings. There was no 24-hour CNN and, pretty much then as now, local TV “news” was mostly bereft of same.
Fast-forward 35 years. My wife and I stopped taking the Houston Chronicle a few months after giving it a trial when we moved to that city in 1998. They only seemed to employ one city government reporter, and one for county government. You couldn’t find out what was really going on at City Hall, let alone learn anything whatsoever about your own neighborhood. Like almost every American city, there was no daily newspaper competition, and the TV “news” coverage revolved around the most spectacular road accidents and shootings. We felt we were receiving very close to no relevant local news whatsoever. And the city and county government coverage was rather flat and one-sided.
Today, I don’t subscribe to any “physical” newspapers, despite having grown up with newsprint-stained fingers and then spending 20 years reporting and editing the news for several print publications. If the Chronicle was irrelevant in Houston, it’s even more so in Fort Bend County. We tried the Herald-Coaster, but frankly, the reporters don’t get out of the Richmond-Rosenberg area often enough, and they don’t ask nearly enough tough questions of public officials or employ sufficient skepticism.
Not that we don’t read any newspapers. I read the Chronicle everyday, and the Herald-Coaster two or three times a week. I also read the New York Times and Washington Post every day, and the Dallas Morning news two or three times a week. And the Fort Worth Star-Telegram occasionally. Also the Los Angeles Times and, the Austin American-Statesman. Online.
Why should we pay for the physical papers when their online versions are free?
Thus it has evolved that, thanks to the Internet, issues of international and national import, and to a lesser extent issues of statewide importance, are brought into fairly sharp focus for ordinary people such as me, thanks to numerous news sources dissecting them and providing the results free on their web sites.
I feel like I have a very good handle on the strategy behind the behavior of my elected officials in Washington, such as President Bush and my congressman, Tom DeLay. It’s murkier, but I also feel as though I can keep abreast of some of what the state legislature is up to (or not up to, like fixing public school funding), because several major news organizations are watching. As a result of the World Wide Web, I think I’m better informed than ever before when it comes to national and regional news.
However, the Internet hasn’t delivered in terms of local knowledge. In a county with a half-million people, I’m at the mercy of staffing decisions made by the owners of two weekly papers and the aforementioned Herald-Coaster. There’s no Fort Bend County TV station and, as far as I can tell, no Fort Bend County news radio reporters. Consequently, I’m not finding out what I’d like to know.
I think this is pretty much the same situation in which most Americans from small towns or semi-rural or rural areas find themselves. And I’m starting to come to the conclusion that it’s not the fault of young reporters or unagressive assignment editors so much as it is an outdated news delivery model.
Who says a community has to rely on a 24-year-old with a journalism degree to act as the eyes and ears of the community? Each community has lots of eyes and ears, many of them attached to pretty sharp brains.
Is it possible there’s a better way to approach the news-making business?
I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately, and I think the answer is yes, yes there is a better approach.
→ B.Dunn, Jun 15, 2005, 08 15 am