Friday, August 22, 2008

Newspapers not in a cyclical crisis but a grave one with fundemental changes happening

We have heard it all before , but a couple of reports from across the Atlantic are worth a look at.

Mark Fitzgerald and Jennifer Saba write on Editor and Publisher that

Something's happening here, in the newspaper industry, and as the old Baby Boomer anthem goes, what it is ain't exactly clear. Faced with an unprecedented crisis that combines cyclical turbulence with metastasizing digital technology that steals away revenue and readers at an alarming and seemingly accelerating rate (while offering newspapers only stingy payoffs), publishers and editors everywhere have thrown away their rule books — and, to find their way in this new and alien environment, are ready to implement previously unthinkable changes.


and whilst looking at the many neagtives that have been happening in the US newspaper industry over the summer,they look at some specific examples of the fundemental change which includes

1.changing the mix od editoral and advertising tomore of a 50/50 split,

2.That some newspapers are shrinking and even thoughts of cutting back on publishing days.

3.Essentially getting to a product that requires less people and is more cost effective

4.Cuts in marketing and research, as profitability fall as with many businesses the cash for future investment diminishes.This could mean that the concept of chasing the reader is end.

Meanwhile Vin Crosbie's piece on Transforming American newspapers is highly recommended by Roy Greenslade who says

A thoughtful, if bleak, assessment of the state of newspapers in the United States should be read here in Britain with an understanding that our industry, regional and national, is likely to follow a similar route.


Crosbie begins by saying that

Most of the American media

have finally begun to realize that the deterioration of their businesses isn't cyclical but grave
but adding that

Yet few, if any, understand why. Almost all grasp for the reasons.


For Crosbie

To understand the real reasons why the American daily newspaper industry is dying, first understand why more and more Americans are no longer reading daily papers and how their abandonment of newspapers has been wrought by changes in their own media economics. Also comprehend why the epicenter of the newspaper industry's problems in post-Industrial countries is America and exactly how grave the situation is there


The article points at how people have hidden behind the new media as being the cause but as Crosbie says

Yet adding multimedia, convergence, interactivity, Web 2.0, and 'citizen journalism' to what their newspapers have always done aren't cures but merely balms and accessories. No matter how well intentioned those New Media prescriptions are, no matter how much more animated or responsive multimedia and interactivity can make daily newspapers, adding those will prove to be little more than analgesics.


The real reasons are the industry has failed to adapt to the new supply and demand.They have he says failed to

adapt their core product to a radical change in consumers' supply of news and information during the past 15 years


Crosbie will be explaining that concept further in later posts

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