Whap! Whap!

Once again, with its recent filing for bankruptcy, The Columbian has come to epitomize the newspaper industry’s woes.

Like every newspaper company that has gone bankrupt, The Columbian cites the overall economic downturn carrying too much debt on the books for its predicament.

Yet like all those other companies, the paper’s problem run much deeper than that. Worse yet, like all those other papers, it refuses to transform itself in any meaningful way.

The arguments are familiar: Operations are cash-flow positive, it has a sustainable business model, the good times will return, and it is not out of touch with its customer base.

Let’s look at each argument.

• We’re cash-flow positive. Whose balance sheet wouldn’t look rosy if we could all stop paying for our loans and supplies? It’s true that publishing companies have wasted much of the money they have borrowed on over-priced acquisitions and pointless new buildings. But as long as newspapers remain locked in their manufacturing mindset, even frugal companies need to power to feed an extremely capital-intensive business model. Bankruptcy might wipe clean some of the current debt, but it doesn’t solve the longterm problem.
• We have a sustainable business model. Not if you don’t figure in capital needs. But more to the point, “sustainability” has come to be measured in a paper’s ability to cut services to its customers at a rate more or less equal to its loss of revenue. That’s not sustainability; that’s a death spiral.
• The good times will return. Maybe. But the erosion of both the advertiser and consumer customer base didn’t start in 2008. It started decades ago, and the overall trajectory has been pointing downhill at a rapidly accelerating rate. So what good times are we going return to? The golden years of the 1950s and ’60s? The times before the internet, 24-hour cable news and all the societal changes of the past few decades? Or just to the times when things were declining at a slower rate than they are right now?
• We are not out of step with society. In a column about the bankruptcy filing, The Columbian’s editor addressed accusations of bias: “Some let us know what they think is the real reason we’re having problems: We’re too conservative; we’re too liberal; we don’t cover The University of Oregon well enough; we cover The University of Oregon too much. You get the picture.” I guess I get the picture: Papers are going to address charges of bias the same way they cover almost everything else, with bland he-said-she-said analysis. Some say we’re liberal, some say we’re conservative, so they negate each other and prove we are neither. But don’t expect us to examine specific complaints, relative numbers of people who feel a certain way or the depth with which they feel those sentiments. We’ll just arrogantly dismiss everyone who wants answers and change. We’re fair and balanced; we make everybody mad.

There’s not much sport left any more in being a newspaper critic. News executives are going to continue down this suicidal path no matter what anyone says. It’s hard to care about the fate of newspapers now because it appears publishers and editors themselves don’t care.

Their spirits were bankrupt long before their bank accounts were.

Editor and Publisher tackles an idea too often ignored among newspapers: Blowing up the newsroom.

E and P calls it Mobile Journalism, or MoJo. I think putting reporter and editors out in the field will result in better journalism, better morale and better employee health. Not to mention it could save big bucks for publishers. How many papers are struggling to finance fancy new buildings while laying off the people they built the buildings for? The two papers where I spent the bulk of my career (the Dayton Daily News and The Columbian) are both in that situation right now.

Some editors lament the loss of comradery such a move would create, and I’m sensitive to that. On the other hand, no one suggests that staffers never get together, and with technology it’s becoming easy to share tips and humor without being in the same room together. Frankly, I think not being cooped up together might have benefits, tearing down some of the GroupThink that plagues the industry.

I wouldn’t stop with the newsroom. In fact, Advertising and Circulation probably would be easier to disperse. I wouldn’t stop there, either. I would work toward distributing production to small plants or even to on-demand printers in kiosks and stores.

“Impossible!,” publishers will say, “We can’t have people spread out all over town!”

Then again, many of these same publishers are merging copy desks and outsourcing work to India …

Oh wait. Never mind. It’s just full-page ads on the home page of nytimes.com. Whew. That’s OK then.

That is OK with me. But imagine the uproar in the industry if more newspapers started to run display ads on the front page of the paper? On the editorial page?

On the one hand, we have newspaper people telling us their websites are the only credible source of information on the web because they really are newspapers, not websites. On the other hand, we’re told they have entirely different rules from those of the newspaper. Ads on Page 1? Paper: bad; website: OK. Ads on editorials? Paper: bad; website: OK. Unsigned letters? Paper: bad; website: OK.

Which is it, guys?

It’s Earth Day, and all along the beautiful country roads that lead to my home you see hybrid cars, signs for organic farms … and miles of piles of soggy telephone directories.

The directories were “delivered,” or “dumped,” by the phone company about 10 days ago. The overwhelming majority are still sitting on the shoulders, in the ditches, or blowing in the fields. And this is just one of about five competing books that get dumped each year.

It’s an insane waste of paper in a time when most people find what they need online. The companies could solve this by delivering only to people who requested a book, but they don’t dare do that. If they did, advertisers might realize what a farce the books are.

Of course, seeing that you’re in the newspaper business, I don’t need to tell you that. Papers have been pulling the same trick with TMC products for years.

Do the directory publishers get it? No. In a recent story, one said it’s just “Wall Street” that doesn’t get it.

I’m not sure there’s a Wall Street in my neck of the woods, but none of the other streets seem to understand the situation, either.

p.s.: No trees were harmed in the making of this website.

It’s a fact. A Pulitizer Prize winner says so. Not only that, but they’re too small and need to be owned by corporate behemoths to ever be good. I wish I were making this up, but it’s all here, in the Washington Post.

Business writer Steven Pearlstein and I agree on some points. Newspapers have to surrender huge profit margins to survive … OK, so we agree on one point.

From there, his recommendations are astonishingly contemptuous of customers. Some highlights:

“Today there are 1,437 daily newspapers in the United States, of which all but 400 have circulations of under 25,000. At that size, it is unlikely they can ever be very efficient or, for that matter, very good.”

(more…)

Jon Carroll writes a stirring tribute to newspapers. It’s here on The Gate.

Mostly it’s the same old, same old we’ve been hearing for years, although there was one line that was new to me: “if someone steals a newspaper, so what? If someone steals your laptop, not so good” I’ll go along with him on that. If someone steals my newspaper, I say “So what?”

He recites the same preposterous claims we read all the time, mostly how websites don’t make money and probably never will. Now, of course he offers no support for this absurdity, but it’s conventional wisdom, so we’ll let it in the paper.

He says “Web sites mostly just aggregate what the newspapers have already aggregated, plus opinion.” Again, he offers no support for this condemnation. But it’s a variation on a theme we read all the time from newspaper people (the only source of information for most towns is newspapers! etc.), so it must be true.

I don’t know which of the internet tubes runs past Mr. Carroll’s office. Must be the same one that runs past Ted Stevens’ office. I wish he could tap into the one that runs past my house. It’s chock full of original information (local, national, international) that I never see in my local papers. In fact, more and more the papers are reporting on things learned from the internet.

(more…)

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?

(more…)