Fred Clark offers up his theory as to why things are as dire as they are for the newspaper industry – that the expectation for profit margins has been grown to something unrealistic these past twenty years: Why oh why can’t we have a better press corps?:
So why oh why don’t we have a better press corps?
Part of the answer to that question is that our newspapers are being asked to do something they were never designed to do and something they are fundamentally and structurally incapable of doing: they’re being asked to provide shareholders with double-digit and ever-increasing profit margins.
This is a ridiculous expectation. If you are an investor looking for a 15- or 20-percent return on your investment and you’ve purchased newspaper stock, then you’re a bad investor. You are, in fact, a stupid and a silly investor. You have invested in the wrong thing for the wrong reasons and you are expecting the wrong results. You are expecting impossible results.
Newspapers have a solid and reliable, but modest, business model. Owning a newspaper — even now, even with competition from cable news and the Internet, and even with Craigslist all but eliminating the classified ad market — is like owning a license to print money. But only a modest amount of money. Buying newspaper stock is thus much like investing in CDs. It’s safe, but humble.
Remember the Savings & Loan debacle of the 1980s? That’s what’s happening right now with newspapers.
Amy Webb is wondering why so many are arguing about arguments instead of focusing on what really counts (I am guilty as charged unfortunately) : Reshaping the Conversation:
Raise your hands: Who’s got an hour today to learn about the geospatial web? What about reality mining using cellular data? What about semantic tagging? 2d barcodes? Mobile frameworks using advanced SMS?
That’s what I thought.
Here’s the real problem facing our newsrooms. Most people are out there playing checkers while companies like Google and Adobe are playing chess. NOTHING WILL CHANGE in journalism unless the conversation is refocused on what matters most: How can the ever-hastening disruptive change be either met or overcome by adapting technology and creative business models?