Rethinking Newspapers: The Dinobaby View
January 27, 2025
A blog post from an authentic dinobaby. He’s old; he’s in the sticks; and he is deeply skeptical.
I read “For Some Newspaper Workers, the New Year Began with Four Weeks of Unpaid Leave.” But the subtitle is the snappy statement:
The chain CNHI furloughed 46 staffers, or about 3% of its workforce. It’s likely a weather vane for industry trouble ahead.
The write up says, rather predictably, in my opinion:
the furloughs were precipitated by a very “soft fourth quarter,” usually the best of the year for newspapers, buoyed with ads for Christmas shopping.
No advertising and Amazon. A one-two punch.
The article concludes:
If you’re looking for a silver lining here, it may be that upstart investors continue to buy up newspapers as they come up for sale, still seeing a potential for profit in the business.
What a newspaper needs is a bit of innovation. Having worked at both newspaper publishing and a magazine publishing companies, I dipped into some of my old lectures about online. I floated these ideas at various times in company talks and in my public lectures, including the one I received from ASIS in the late 1980s. Here’s a selected list:
- People and companies pay for must-have information. Create must-have content in digital form and then sell access to that content.
- Newspapers are intelligence gathering outfits. Focus on intelligence and sell reports to outfits known to purchase these reports.
- Convert to a foundation and get in the grant and fund raising business.
- Online access won’t generate substantial revenue; therefore, use online to promote other information services.
- Each newspaper has a core competency. Convert that core competency into pay-to-attend conferences on specific subjects. Sell booth and exhibit space. Convert selling ads to selling a sponsored cocktail at the event.
- Move from advertising to digital coupons. These can be made available on a simple local-focus Web site. For people who want paper ads, sell a subscription to an envelope containing the coupons and possibly a small amount of information of interest to the area the newspaper serves.
Okay, how many of these ideas are in play today? Most of them, just not from newspaper outfits. That’s the problem. Innovation is tough to spark. Is it too late now? My research team has more ideas. Write benkent2020 at yahoo dot com.
Stephen E Arnold, January 27, 2024
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