Tim Oren, a right-of-centre political blogger at Winds of Change, has a quite cogent report on the state of newspapers that we who love them hope doesn’t spread far.
I was attracted to his piece by the headline: The newspaper crash of 2009 … and how you can help.
In his post, he lays out the business behind the circulation model, details newspaper company debt loads and brings in the effect of current economic nastiness. All this is familiar ground, and he covers it nicely, although he does ignore the role of advertising in the media financial model.
Then, he gets to the how-you-can-help part:
Cancel your subscriptions, if you haven’t already.
If you buy advertising, move it to the Internet, and find out how to meet your customers 1-1.
Keep your ads and clicks away from Internet properties owned by the papers, e.g., Careerbuilder, cars.com and about.com.
Should you provide product or service to a newspaper, cut their credit or demand cash up front. You’ll find plenty of reasons that this is prudent business.
Help an older person find what they need online instead; they’re nearly the only demographic the papers have left.
When the lights go out at the New York Times, our work will be finished.
My god. Why?
One of the reasons that churn is up for the newspapers is the political bias … The industry has abdicated its social function to support a well-informed electorate, and become a propaganda arm of the left. In so doing, they have sullied their brands and lost the trust of their readers. The economic consequences of this default of their value proposition are now becoming apparent. The Internet and an economic crisis together would be bad enough, but the industry has only itself to blame for the egregious behavior on display for the last few years, and at its worst right now.
Ah, it’s the (to my mind largely bogus) damned-liberal-press argument.
I don’t know how many readers Winds of Change has, or how much influence it has on the right-hand side of the political blogosphere. But I do suspect there are doing to be a lot of extremely pissed-off people after the U.S. presidential votes are counted. Oren’s “prescription” could appeal to some of them, adding another drop or two to the floodwaters washing over the big American media companies.
Tags: business, newspapers, the right
