"Chez Newspaper"...
Three more editorial cartoonists lost their staff jobs at daily papers last week. Among the many reactions to the layoffs, Jimmy Margulies did a pretty ingenious mock news article which reported that Harper's Weekly had eliminated the position of Thomas Nast.
I did a bit of analysis on the challenges facing the newspaper industry (and by extension my chosen profession) in this post last year. However, I think this article by Philip Meyer is a must-read. Here's a few highlights:
The endgame for newspapers is in sight. How their owners and managers choose to apply their dwindling resources will make all the difference in the nature of the ultimate product, its service to democracy and, of course, its survival.
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It is now clear that [the internet] is as disruptive to today's newspapers as Gutenberg's invention of movable type was to the town criers, the journalists of the 15th century.
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Robert Picard, a media economist who looks at newspapers from an international perspective, believes that [newspapers] try to do too much. He expressed this view in June at the Carnegie-Knight Task Force conference on the Future of Journalism at Harvard University. Newspapers "keep offering an all-you-can-eat buffet of content, and keep diminishing the quality of that content because their budgets are continually thinner," he said. "This is an absurd choice because the audience least interested in news has already abandoned the newspaper."
If they should peel back to some core function, newspapers would still have to worry about the Internet and its unbeatable capacity for narrowcasting. The newspapers that survive will probably do so with some kind of hybrid content: analysis, interpretation and investigative reporting in a print product that appears less than daily, combined with constant updating and reader interaction on the Web.
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[I]t is possible to envision a scenario in which newspapers trim down to a specialized product and survive by serving a narrow market well. They are already trimming down. But what are they trimming down to? Have they thought about what's left after all the shrinkage?
One of the rules of thumb for coping with substitute technology is to narrow your focus to the area that is the least vulnerable to substitution
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I still believe that a newspaper's most important product, the product least vulnerable to substitution, is community influence. It gains this influence by being the trusted source for locally produced news, analysis and investigative reporting about public affairs. This influence makes it more attractive to advertisers.
It's pretty clear to me what major industry in this country is most in need of a "bailout"... the question is: would they know how to use it right?
Fyi - no animation quite yet on this 'toon again, but if you missed it, I did do a little something for last week's. I'm kinda liking this schedule of getting the static 'toon done and posted on Mondays, and then coming back to the animation later in the week (when I can take my time and put some thought into it).
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