These are some of the things that have caught my attention lately. It’s a more eclectic mix than just the news business, but then so’s life:
- Online Newspaper Growth Continues to Impress | Seeking Alpha — “Despite the current troubles for the traditional newspaper industry, people are visiting newspaper sites more and more often to stay on top of current events,” said Schilling. “The challenge for newspaper publishers today is to learn how to capitalize on this active online readership and translate their increasing engagement into revenue.”
- Why Celebrity Magazines Should Be OK | Jeff Bercovici — “Expensive gas, as I’ve noted, depresses magazine sales in a number of ways: Consumers make fewer trips to he supermarket and have less money to spend when they get there, and wholesalers make fewer deliveries so that news racks are apt to be more lightly stocked. A gallon of gas currently costs a dollar and change less than it did a year ago; if prices hold, the effects should start showing up in sales figures soon.”
- A News Corp. Bull Throws in the Towel; Wall Street Journal Layoffs Coming? | Peter Kafka — “Our fear is that News Corp. is so committed to its existing businesses that it will be willing to sustain businesses that slip into negative profitability for years, (similar to its approach to the NY Post). We believe several of its TV stations are or will shortly be ‘in the red,’ with book publishing heading for losses, as well as a significant number of its Newspapers. In fact, on a reported operating income basis, Dow Jones will generate meaningful losses in its first full-year of News Corp. ownership following its $5.7 billion acquisition.”
- Matthew Engel: Dispatch from Colindale | FT.com — In an anonymous pair of buildings on an anonymous street in an anonymous north London suburb there lurks one of the world’s greatest repositories of intellectual treasure.
One uses the words “intellectual” and “treasure” with some diffidence. For here, too, lie all the foulest aspects of humanity, as well as its occasional best. Here is all the vileness and degradation and vice and versa and worser. This is Colindale, home of the British Library’s newspaper section, traditionally the final resting place of the old newspapers of Britain and much of the world.
- Davos 2009: Newspapers Remain Dead | Tom Glocer — Newsprint is an output device, not an end in itself. What matters is quality journalism which can and does thrive in multiple media.
There are several advantages of paper: it is light to carry, highly legible, and can be folded, written upon and read on the train or in the small tiled room. However, paper has its limitations: it is relatively expensive, must be physically delivered, is less environmentally friendly than digital bits, and cannot be easily searched or processed. This latter point has resulted in the near destruction of the print newspaper model as classified advertising has fled online.
While these trends are not universal, the combination of these structural challenges with the tremendous cyclical pressures being experienced in most markets should not make one optimistic about the future of the print-only model.
Instead, of lamenting that the 4th Estate is dead, we should celebrate the innovations of the current age that can now be applied to telling the story - The Nonprofit Newspaper | Seeking Alpha — I don’t think that raising substantial endowments for genuinely important newspapers like the New York Times or the Washington Post would be particularly hard. The more difficult bit is how do we get there from here, given the fact that they’re for-profit companies right now, with fiduciary responsibilities to their shareholders.
My idea is to dilute the current shareholders to the point of irrelevance by essentially raising the funds for the endowment through the sale of new shares. There are probably other ways to achieve this too. The downside, of course, is that the family owners of the newspapers in question would see their own net worth — or at least the part of it tied up in the paper — also brought down to zero.
- Steve Coll: Nonprofit Newspapers | The New Yorker — “Yes, my thinking is admittedly rooted in an aging generation’s experience. Still, there is just no substitute for the professional, civil-service-style, relentless independent thinking, reporting, and observation that developed in big newsrooms between the Second World War and whenever it was that the end began—about 2005 or so. And those qualities arose from the scale of those newsrooms, and the way the quasi-monopoly business model and high-quality family owners shielded them from political or commercial pressure—not perfectly, but largely. Yes, the big papers failed, as in the run-up to the Iraq war, but they succeeded much more often. They practiced a kind of journalism that, on the whole, was better for a democratic constitutional system than any journalism ever practiced before, anywhere. So sayeth me, at any rate.”
- Computers Destroying the Print Media: A History | Valleywag — Owen Thomas wrap: “Is it any surprise that print is dying? Not for newspapers. In fits and starts since the 1970s and 1980s, they (and others) have been looking to go electronic but they screwed it up. Watch!”