Online revenue will never match print revenue! Oh, no!
There’s a page of letters at EditorandPublisher.com today decrying this reality. “Online revenues will never equal the print model and cannot support the editorial and business staffs necessary to do a good job of reporting and disseminating the information,” Ken Anderberg, a Florida publisher, moans.
It’s a cry we hear from publishers all the time, but it begs the question: Why does that matter?
Online costs will never match print costs, either.
It’s sad and comical to hear publishers who proudly tout the benefits of cutting an inch off of pages but who can’t see the possible benefit of cutting out newsprint altogether.
But it’s not just the cost of newsprint that publishers will save. There will be no more trucks. No more diesel. No more enormous capital costs for presses, inserting machines and the buildings that house them. No more clunky proprietary newsroom and classified systems. Perhaps no more newspaper building at all, at least as we now know them. Employees can work from satellite offices, from home, from news events or sales calls.
News staffs could be reorganized as artificial deadlines disappear. Copy desks would be freed from filling artificial newsholes and could focus on stories that need attention, not filler for the inside of the front section.
The business side would be dramatically smaller. Billing becomes almost entirely automated. Purchasing becomes even less essential than it is now. Tax issues become less burdensome. Debt service is virtually eliminated. HR no longer has to handle production and circulation employees and the specific safety issues that they entail. Insurance costs plummet.
Some costs stay the same. You still have to pay reporters, photographers, sales people, systems people, etc. Some costs probably go up, for example, without newspaper boxes (and physical newspapers lying around), promotion becomes more important and difficult.
Online-only publication (or variations on that theme; mostly online with small specialty print products, for example) is not a panacea. Far from it. It’s not even necessarily desirable. But it probably is inevitable, so why not start planning for the day?
Why not stop moping about loss of revenue, which already is happening in the current business model, and focus instead on survival first and then on the prospect for higher profit margins?
Cutting costs while trying to support the current model is a loser’s game. To cover rising and largely fixed manufacturing and debt-service costs, the only place left to cut is on “discretionary” spending, which too often means the news gathering operation.
