NewsInc. Logo March 30, 1998, Vol. 10, No. 7

FROM ABC RULES TO LEGAL ADS, CHANGE IS IN INDUSTRY MAELSTROM

Death of another paper casts a big spotlight on need for redirection

Intimates will assure you that I should be the last person extolling the virtues of change.

Poster-boy for the calmness of constancy? Yes. Instigator of innovation? Not hardly.

Nonetheless, there is on the horizon a storm of change that is going to sweep through the newspaper business – a storm that is going to wound some and leave many dead.

I've always believed that newspaper publishers abhor change because of one explicit fact: every morning, when they walk into their composing room, there are banks and banks of open pages (unless they are paginated or are an afternoon paper). Within 12 hours, those blank pages will all fill with advertising, stories and photographs.

I think that publishers subconsciously believe that it's hard enough to make that happen without having to deal with change in the organization or business process as well. Just leave things alone and let us get out the paper, dammit.

Whether we're talking about the realities of direct mail's inroads or the possibilities of on-line's promise, it has come to this: The newspaper business is not like it was 50, 20 or even 10 years ago. Much of the change so far has been subtle; there is a steeliness in the eyes of the survivors of the recession of the early ’90s that just didn't exist in the ’80s.

Many papers are doing one or two things differently, but to survive into the 21st century, papers are going to have to confront wholesale change. Three stories in this issue of NewsInc. bear out that hypothesis:

  • Senior Editor Pete Wetmore's look at the latest in the market segment pricing controversy that has been raging for the last year in the Audit Bureau of Circulations is all too indicative of the newspaper business' total inability to confront change.

    Newspapers have to get on board with the notion that we are going to have to stop trying to serve mass audiences and start giving our advertisers concrete numbers about specific demographic groups. One of the best ways to show advertisers that we have those groups is to give the groups some initiative to subscribe. A discount subscription for revealing some demographic information seems like a fair trade.

    Unfortunately, not for enough members of the newspaper community. They would rather continue in the buggy-whip business.

  • Columnist Christopher J. Feola chats about the potential loss of legal advertising in daily newspapers in New(s) Media. Though legals don't represent a huge amount of money, they can certainly be seen as "free" money – relatively low sales effort, relatively low production costs, high return. But, if as Feola postulates, legals go on-line and fall out of the daily newspaper, this "free" money will become someone else's windfall, not the newspaper's.

    What are you doing to attempt to offset the loss of legals? Are you working with your state legislature? Are you building an on-line system that could become the place on the Web where legals could be posted?

  • It was just one title in the cluster that Copley Newspapers has run in suburban Los Angeles for the last couple of decades. The Outlook of Santa Monica wasn't a particularly good newspaper, but good, bad or indifferent, it died earlier this month; we've run a small obit on Page 6.

    The people of Santa Monica get good local news in a zoned edition of the Los Angeles Times and, for most, they won't even know of the loss. But every time another daily newspaper folds, a chill runs up my spine. What did the owners try? Why weren't they successful? Had they chosen death over change?

    I'm afraid of the answer to that last question. I'm afraid that the fear of change in the newspaper business is so great that we'll let our livelihoods die out from under us rather than do things differently. There seem to be two paths: You can blithely produce your newspaper the way you always have and pilot it into oblivion, or you can change the way you do business. Not tomorrow. Today.

    – David M. Cole

    Inside ...

    From NEWSINC., March 30, 1998, Copyright © 1998, The Cole Group. All Rights Reserved.

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