Young at Heart Advise Newspapers about Survival
August 17, 2009
I enjoy the Mashable write ups. The coverage of my area of interest is tangential, but I like the approach taken by the publication. The article “12 Things Newspapers Should Do to Survive” is what I call outputs from the peanut gallery. The author is a student, and he does not have decades of travail trying to generate revenues, deal with staff benefits, and mud wrestling with printers, paper suppliers, and – yikes – syndicators. Students have a freshness that azure-chip, blue-chip, and try-too-hard-to-be-brilliant consultants lack. Let me give you an example. Mashable recommended to newspapers that a newspaper should develop a start up culture. Stop right there. Newspapers think that many of their actions are entrepreneurial. Newspaper managers are knee deep in new technology, innovations that require high-power publishing systems, and wallow in programmers, consultants, and information technology professionals. What Mashable’s advice overlooks is that the meaning of start up to a Mashable writer like Vadim Lavrusi means one thing. Start up to a newspaper executive in Peoria, Illinois means something else. You can work through the shopping list of recommendations. One or two may resonate with newspaper publishers. Most won’t. As a result, the financial challenges the newspapers face seem to be outside the newspapers’ span of control. Paper is getting more expensive. Ink is an environmental issue. Distribution is both a management headache and a money pit. On the other side where new media thrives, outfits like Google as “publishing” creative commons books. Aggregators are becoming more sophisticated. Check out Surchur.com, for one example I reviewed today. New competitors are springing from the ranks of journalists fired by newspapers as they try to control costs by killing off their expensive professionals. I agree with most of Mashable’s suggestions. I fear that many of them are beyond the grasp of newspapers. I subscribe to four traditional newspapers. I find about two thirds of the information “old”; that is, I have seen the topics in my electronic tools. The other one third does not interest me. One of these newspapers spams me to become a subscriber, oblivious to the fact that I point out that their policy reminds me of Nigerian email scammers. With “time” an issue, I think that newspapers struggle with real time because time for many is running out.
Stephen Arnold, August 16, 2009
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