The End of the End

You might not be interested, but my resume-since-birth includes:

1972-1974       New York Post -Newspaper Delivery

1978-1979       Albany Student Press-Advertising Production Manager

1979-1980       Albany Student Press-Advertising Manager

1985-1996       Knight-Ridder, Inc.-Various Business Information Positions

So I’m mourning the slow death of newspapers.  Most businesses and industries take a longer to die than you think.  (My worst lesson: short AOL after visiting Netscape in 1994.)  My first hint of newspapers being sick was in a November 1993 Bernstein Research report titled Red Sky at Morning: The Newspaper Industry.  The key sentence was on the cover:  “Longer term, pricing power to weaken in the wake of changing advertising habits and encroachment by technologically-advanced competition…” That was prescient and for me the beginning of the end. Now you can read some really horrible stuff – Michael Porter cited at PressThink:

…a last-resort business model for companies undermined by substitute technology. He calls it "harvesting market position." Managers do it by raising prices and reducing quality so they can shell out the money and run. I know of no newspaper companies that are doing this consciously, but the behavior of most points in this direction: smaller newshole, lighter staffing, and reduced community service, leading, of course, to fading readership, declining circulation, and lost advertising. Plot it on a graph, and it looks like a death spiral.

And more: Craig Newmark in a post called Laying the Newspaper Gently Down to Die.  Or thoughts from McKinsey regarding whether or not a tabloid format will save newspapers. (No.)  Scobleizer’s view on the NY Times charging for content:  They are preparing for the death of print.  Doc Searls said it well over at Buzzmachine:  "You need to come up with business models that support news without newspapers."