Sad day. The Seattle P-I was a fixture of my childhood, as my dad was a photographer there for nearly 20 years. When I was a kid, a few times I was allowed to sit and watch David Horsey and Steve Greenberg work at their desks, which were adjacent to the photographers' area. I went to Ingraham High School, just as Horsey did, and drew cartoons for the school newspaper. My dad's salary at the P-I would eventually put me through college at the University of Washington.
More than sad though, I am pissed off. There's something that's been bothering me for a long time, which was brought up again by this article in the NYT the other day and its accompanying graphic. I've written longer analyses on the plight of newspapers before, but if you'll permit me, I'd like to indulge in a little angry, superficial, Republican-style ranting about my surface impressions on a complex issue, the finer details of which I have little understanding. I am not an economist. I won't pretend that I have an alternative business model that will definitely work for newspapers, and that they are fools for ignoring this obvious course of action.
However, my read of the landscape tells me that this entire predicament for newspapers basically boils down to the existence of one website... CraigsList. The biggest killer for newspapers throughout this crisis seems to have been the drying up of their classified advertising dollars because of CraigsList. And thus, here's my rant: how in the hell can one little piddling website bring an entire vital industry like this to its knees?! How could newspapers not have a plan for this in their business models? The NYT article has the beginnings of an additional explanation -- that the huge newspaper chains took on too much debt "in a spree of buying other newspapers from 2005 to 2007, just before the bottom dropped out of the business" -- but that still doesn't explain to me the across-the-board tanking that you see in the Times' graphic. Not all failing newspapers are owned by greedy conglomerates.
How could newspapers have allowed this to happen to them?
This is not rhetorical... someone smarter than me please help me out with this...
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
I'd like to comment but I am afraid that I would go on and on and on...
My short take is....I basically see that what is happening with newspapers today is they got very lazy earning high profits and assuming that gravy train would continue. They did not look at or plan for the future. When they saw what was coming it was already too late. They are loosing subscribers because they are giving them "news" that is old by the time it's read.
They are loosing readers, advertisers and relevance.
Any industry who's profits continually depend on 12 year-old kids delivering a product made from crude oil and dead trees is bound to fail.
It's a lot more complicated than that but hat's my short take.
"Any industry who's profits continually depend on 12 year-old kids delivering a product made from crude oil and dead trees is bound to fail."
That's an excellent point that I think is not made often enough... newspaper is an inherently inefficient and outdated means of conveying information...
Probably just underscores the fact that newspapers haven't handled the transition gracefully, to say the least...
Post a Comment