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Newspapers are finally accounting for their assumptions of necessity throughout the last 15 years. My family was involved in what at one time was the second lar
by ethank 14y ago
Newspapers are finally accounting for their assumptions of necessity throughout the last 15 years. My family was involved in what at one time was the second largest paper in CA (the OC Register). My mom was the CFO and I started there at 15 as their first webmaster.
My mom would always bring home things for me to test as "threats" to the paper rather than opportunities. Delphi, Prodigy, Aol, compuserve, eworld, Microsoft blackbird, cd-I and finally a BRI ISDN PPP account.
Threats. Not opportunities. When they finally put the entire newspaper online it was in PDF. I left in 2001.
And then went into the music business in 2005. Hah.
- ethank 14y agoTo be clear my mom was on the right side. The publisher was on the "threat" side.
- natrius 14y agoThe publisher was right. It's 2012 and we still don't know how to make newsgathering profitable online. It's easy to say that news organizations should have been on the forefront of adopting new technologies, but even today in the internet's adolescence, print journalism is significantly more profitable. Convincing people to stick with print as long as possible while staving off "threats" was the right strategy as far as I can tell.
- ak217 14y agoIt was the right short-term strategy. Would you rather be in charge of a media enterprise that is producing dwindling revenue, has a limited lifespan, aging workforce and no way to attract new talent, or one with smaller but rising revenue, sexy requisitions and massive future opportunities?
- natrius 14y agoThat dichotomy is convenient, but false. News organizations have no problem attracting new talent. It is difficult to get a job as a journalist. The only news organizations that both have had a print product and meet your latter description stopped printing because they'd squeezed all of the profit out of it that was there to have, and their "smaller but rising revenue" from their online operations are all that remain. Until you can point to an online business model that is more profitable than print, preserving print and its attendant profits was clearly the right strategy.
- ethank 14y agoRight? I don't think so. I didn't mention the Craigslist "We will never sell classified space online!" diatribe either. The point was: THEY WERE on the forefront of new technologies. OCR was the 5th newspaper online (after Mercury News, SF Chronicle, NY Times, Detroit Free Press). And I don't think you understand the cost of print journalism. Print journalism might be more profitable if you have an economy of scale to support is infrastructure, but even in 1999 the display ad and classified business was waning to the point where it didn't break even on a single property. Only in aggregate for OCR's parent (Freedom Communications). And lets not even talk daily subscription numbers, which were on the decline starting around the same time. Newspapers followed a similar, albeit slower arc that the music business has, especially the recorded music business. A lot of the same hubris included.
- natrius 14y agoClassifieds were a huge oversight that the industry deserves to be excoriated for. The print newspaper I worked for is still limping along on its print revenues. If the OCR wasn't making money on print ads, how did it stay in business?
- ethank 14y agoFreedom Communications was making money in aggregate.