

What should newspapers have done? - cwan
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2009/09/what_should_newspapers_have_do.cfm

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uuilly
The Economist is a great example for print media to follow. Here is what they
do well:

1) Have an opinion, state it clearly and incorporate it into every piece.
Articles can be a lot shorter and more informative if you don't have to "show
each perspective" (which I think is impossible to do well.)

2) Create content that is so good, people will pay for it. Part of this is
hiring insightful writers, part is sending them all over the world where a
story is always happening and part is journalistic integrity. An untrustworthy
news source is not valuable.

3) Avoid the butter battle. They don't play the tit for tat game with other
columnists. The paper would read nearly the same whether they had a million
competitors or none. It stands on its own axioms.

4) Understand your market:

[http://fora.tv/2007/02/05/Uncommon_Knowledge_John_Micklethwa...](http://fora.tv/2007/02/05/Uncommon_Knowledge_John_Micklethwait)

In this interview the editor of the economist talks about how they compete not
with other newspapers but with people's time. He says that his customers are
busy people with lots of money and they are willing to pay for a concise view
on the world.

5) Give people the tools to win debates. Reading the news is really pushups
for your next dinner party debate. Hardly anyone acts directly on what's
happening in the news other than through conversation.

When I read the Economist cover to cover for 3 years while living in DC, I
could go toe to toe w/ anyone in the think tank / foreign policy / political
circuit even though I was an engineer / outsider. Not sure it did me any good
other than satisfy my curiosity and competitive streak, but it was really fun
and worth the money.

~~~
bokonist
_When I read the Economist cover to cover for 3 years while living in DC, I
could go toe to toe w/ anyone in the think tank / foreign policy / political
circuit even though I was an engineer / outsider._

Read Unqualified Reservations and you'll be able to knock them out cold. You
might end up in padded room though.

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hristov
What the newspapers should have done is not take out so much debt. The one
tiny inconvenient fact in the whole whinefest which is the newspaper industry
today is that those runaway news paper costs everyone complains about are
mostly due to debt service and not to "quality journalism." The debt was used
to: (i) acquisitions and/or (ii) pay the owners nice dividends.

See there used to be a business model where newspapers would simply make
acquisitions until there is a single paper in each city and then hike up ad
prices and make a lot of money. This does not work anymore, because with the
internet you can never entirely capture an advertising market. So now the
papers are stuck with the enourmous debt of acquisitions and without the
monopoly profits they were expecting.

Big f-ing deal. They made an incorrect business decision and now they are
suffering the consequences. I don't know why I should be worried about that.

If somebody is worried about journalism, someone should start a news website
with none/little debt and they should be able to make enough money for quality
journalism and a tidy profit. Advertising online is valuable and one can get
good money for ads on sites people really like to read. One may argue that
this is already happening today.

~~~
Perceval
So it seems as though the railroad metaphor in the _Economist_ blog was apt:
once the railroads/newspapers could no longer use finance in order to
establish monopolies and then extract monopoly rents from their customers, it
was good old competition that did them in.

There was a good article on a _New Republic_ blog examining how _Politico_ has
managed to grow and make a profit, even in print, while traditional newspapers
have continued to wither: [http://www.tnr.com/article/the-scoop-
factory?id=82d8d496-d40...](http://www.tnr.com/article/the-scoop-
factory?id=82d8d496-d402-4863-b98d-8967de7cc6ab)

~~~
hristov
Not sure about that metaphor. I don't know much about the railroad's pricing
but it seems to me what did them in was that the government decided to
subsidize their competitor. The government poured trillions of dollars into
highways and there just wasn't much the railroads could do. The railroad is
actually more efficient than the road so it is a very bad metaphor for a paper
newspaper. Of course that did not matter once the government started making
roads and offering them for free to all car owners.

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modeless
There's still a demand for newspapers, it's just shrinking. As a country we're
myopically focused on growth, but isn't there a place for businesses which are
shrinking too? What's wrong with saying "the newspapers should reduce their
size in an orderly way, in sync with declining demand"? Shouldn't it be
possible to manage a shrinking business in such a way that it continues to
generate profits until demand vanishes entirely?

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mmt
I have trouble following the article, since it appears based on the premise
that rail is dead, which it very much is not, especially for freight.

What am I missing?

~~~
tarkin2
Rail has lost its dominance, and has experienced a decline in profitability.

~~~
mmt
It obviously hasn't been dominant for passenger traffic for quite some time,
but, for freight, it's still a major player.

How much of a decline in profitability? How does that compare to other
transportation modes?

------
ilamont
One thing they should have done: Built out their online sales staff and online
ad programs 5 years ago, while educating/working with customers (mostly local
businesses) about the benefits of online programs.

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TravisLS
This article begins with a false analogy in its comparison of the plights of
railroads and newspapers. Newspapers are not in the "newsprint" business, as
suggested here, but rather in the journalism business. The mechanism for
distribution of the information is not especially relevant, nor does it impact
the newspaper companies' core competencies as much as any of the sources of
this article suggest.

I don't really think it's as much of a stretch to imagine newspaper companies
expanding into other media as it is to imagine railroads expanding into
airborne freight. The problem is that strictly online providers were able to
provide comparable information in a more convenient medium years before anyone
in newspapers saw the light.

Of course, that doesn't mean it's too late to embrace online as the medium of
choice for journalism companies.

~~~
Perceval
Relatedly, Clay Shirky had an interesting article distinguishing between
newspapers and journalism saying, "Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we
need is journalism."

[http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-
thinking...](http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-
unthinkable/)

------
hooande
A railroad company could have moved into the trucking or air freight business.
But newspapers had no chance to move into the "world wide web" business. There
was nothing they could do to match the information distribution capability of
social networking, online communities or news aggregators.

Times have changed, and I'm not sure that there was anything that newspapers
should have done differently. I don't like the idea of a CEO saying "Well, it
looks like our market is shrinking so I'd better start organizing an orderly
failure"...but I don't know what I would do in a similar situation. At this
point you would have to be truly visionary/insane to move very far away from
your core business.

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cpach
Not relied too much on income from advertising?

~~~
Perceval
That, and invented a time machine in order to go back in time and kill Craig
Newmark's parents before he was conceived.

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pclark
they should have evolved before, or with, the curve. They're about 5 years
late to the online game.

They've lost too much ground and don't have enough $$ to evolve now.

