Today, the Newspaper Association of America closes out its annual conference with a keynote speech from Google CEO Eric Schmidt. In advance of Schmidt’s address, others have been speculating about what they would say if given the chance to address the assembled news executives.
At BuzzMachine, Jeff Jarvis pulled no punches in a post titled “The speech the NAA should hear.” An excerpt:
You blew it.
You’ve had 20 years since the start of the web, 15 years since the creation of the browser and craigslist, a decade since the birth of blogs and Google to understand the changes in the media economy and the new behaviors of the next generation of - as you call them, Mr. Murdoch - net natives. You’ve had all that time to reinvent your products, services, and organizations for this new world, to take advantage of new opportunities and efficiencies, to retrain not only your staff but your readers and advertisers, to use the power of your megaphones while you still had it to build what would come next. But you didn’t.
You blew it.
Blogger Jason Fry was a bit more sanguine:
All is not lost. We have a business with a number of strengths that executives in more-nascent industries would kill for: a highly trained work force with skills that aren’t irreplaceable but are hard to duplicate; actual revenue and customers; a longstanding place in society that even doubters and grousers regard as critical; and an institutional history that’s woven through the larger history of our cities and towns.
The problem is we need to transfer those strengths from serving the crumbling model to the new one that’s being built experiment by experiment.
There’s clearly much more to be said when it comes to the future of newspapers. So we wonder: What would you say to the Newspaper Association of America if you had the chance? How would you respond to Jarvis and Fry?
Accept permanently lower profit margins; resurrect journalism's adversarial spirit vis-a-vis the powerful; collaborate with your competitors and the public; be humble; explain what you do and why to your readers; start working, in the classroom and in the wider public arena, to change the narrative about journalism in this country.
#1 Posted by Brent Cunningham, CJR on Wed 8 Apr 2009 at 06:15 PM
Sometimes you can have a very good business without really understanding what business you’re in. Just ask a daily newspaper – and hurry while you can still talk to one without a séance or a Ouija board.
Newspapers long trumpeted that they were in the News Business. In the last few decades, that changed to the Media Business or Communications Business, but those two were really just the News Business with a college degree and a daily clean shirt.
And now that newspapers find themselves flopping in the muck at the bottom of a rapidly draining pond, they’re using their last gill-gasps to wonder what happened to the News Business.
Which is odd, because they mostly had much less to do with news than they did with delivering it. Then again, a fedora with a “Delivery” card tucked into its brim doesn’t have quite the cachet of one that says “Press.”
What newspapers were delivering was events that happened outside the immediate range of most folks, but interested them nonetheless. You didn’t need a newspaper to tell you your teenage daughter was gaga over that lowlife down the street or other really important stuff. Instead they delivered news that Senator Windbag’s bill to tax public flatulence had been tooted out of Congress, or that the Red Sox had laundered the White Sox.
The hunter-gatherers who found and processed these events, the reporters and editors, developed an endless capacity for self inflation, but the whole process depended on delivery, not discovery. No matter how penetrating your insight, how soaring your prose, how stunning your revelation, it was for zilch unless an awful lot of folk wrestling heavy machinery, driving fleets of trucks and hauling bundled newspapers in bags or little red wagons did their stuff.
That was the service that the most valuable subscribers signed up for – home delivery.
It was the home delivery subscriber that advertising salesfolk peddled to advertisers, convincing them to make the never-quite-proven assumption that all these folk (a.) read the paper daily and (b.) would read their ad if they did. Newsstand sales counted, sure, but kind of like a walk down the aisle after the third kid – acknowledged, but not really celebrated.
And the subscribers stuck around because they had no real alternative, especially in the one-newspaper towns that came to be the norm.. Although broadcast news was handy and multimedia, it was usually constrained to a predetermined time slot and a predetermined length. Nothing else delivered content in a way that subscribers could use pretty much any way they wanted any time they wanted, at least within the confines of an hours-long publishing and delivery cycle. And within the limits of content discovered and selected by the reporter and editors.
That setup drove profit margins that were so obscene they were seldom discussed in public, attention instead being lavished on the reporters and editors, who liked hearing how important they were so much they were willing to ignore generally crummy pay and worse hours. Like parakeets before mirrors, they were in love and nothing else mattered.
Then came the telecommunications revolution. Events still happened and folks were still interested in them, but they didn’t need a report delivered via truck or underpaid kid. They could go online and get it whenever they wanted.
In fact, they didn’t even need the reporter/editor hunter/gatherer crowd as much, since just about anyone near an event could capture and post it for anyone else to see.
That’s over-simplified, but the subscribers lost interest in getting filtered information gathered and delivered via presses and trucks and under-tipped kids and stopped paying for them all. Maybe not all at once, but a website called “Newspaper Death Watch” being pre
#2 Posted by Larry Blasko, CJR on Wed 8 Apr 2009 at 07:17 PM
stop complaining about the high cost of wood pulp newsprint and support legalization of industrial hemp. It's not the same as marijuana.
#3 Posted by sophie jensen, CJR on Thu 9 Apr 2009 at 12:42 PM
I would say to publishers "how do you like wearing the orange jumpsuit?" and
"how does the shoe feel on the other foot?"
And I allow nothing on their jail-cell television sets except John Stewart's take-down, now available in an easy-to-read URL:
http://tinyurl.com/press-indicted
If they tire of television, they can read the indictment:
http://tinyurl.com/press-malpractice
#4 Posted by Gen. Attny, CJR on Thu 9 Apr 2009 at 04:32 PM
Yeah What That First Poster ( Brent Cunningham ) Wrote - nailed it.
i would add Lose The Arrogance and Develop Thicker Skin Cuz You Peeps Ain't Right All The Time.
and to top it all off, quit already with the crap, the not news today, yesterday or tomorrow stuff and start delivering what the American Citizens SHOULD Get, Not The Crap That You Say We Want. what a pitiful, shameful business model.
#5 Posted by Just A Reader, CJR on Sun 12 Apr 2009 at 04:17 PM