By Doug Draper
“In most industries, if your customers were leaving in droves, you would try to figure out what to do to get them back,” said Arianna Huffington during an address she delivered at a journalism conference recently in Washington, D.C.
“(But) not in the media,” she continued. “They’d rather accuse (newer online sources of news and commentary) of stealing their content.”
Arianna Hufftington, I don’t mind telling you, is one of this journalist’s inspirations as I forge ahead with Niagara At Large, an online site for news and commentary for the greater Niagara region I hope will grow to be a regional equivalent of her an internationally renown online news blog, The Huffington Post.
Huffington summed it up as well as anyone could in her Washington speech. The old media – meaning once time-honoured newspapers and broadcasters of news, now raped to the bone by greedy corporate owners who view the news as not much more than a costly annoyance that takes up space and time that could be filled with more ads – has become the equivalent of a snake eating its own tail.
The old media can cry all it wants about the internet and about bloggers drawing away its readers. Too many newspapers, in particular, have taken to blaming the internet for the massive hemorrhaging of readers and advertisers as if there is nothing they could possibly do to keep readers or draw them back.
One thing they could have done was continue to invest an adequate amount of money in their newsrooms so that readers could still open their community papers and find lots of local news worth reading rather pick something up they can dump in the recycling box after five minutes. Come to think of it, advertisers might even be more eager to buy space in a paper that is a real page-turner for readers.
This isn’t rocket science. It is Media 101. If a newspaper owner is willing to invest in the news to a point where readers want to turn from page to page to make sure they are not missing something they want or need to know, then there’s a chance they’ll spot the ads on those pages and everyone is happy. If not, then the readers and advertisers begin falling away to a point where there is not much left to save.
As Huffington put it; “It’s time for the traditional media companies to stop whining and face the facts that far too many of them, lulled by a lack of competition…put cash flow above journalism and badly misread the web when it arrived on the scene. The focus was on consolidation, cost-cutting and pleasing (shareholders) – not on modernization and pleasing their readers.”
In one of the most whining, out-to-lunch columns I read in a newspaper this year, Michael Den Tandt, a columnist for the Sun Media Corporation (a subsidiary of Quebecor Media that owns more than two dozen daily newspapers, including the three dailies in Niagara, Ont. wrote; “Stop blaming the people who run your local daily, or their bosses at head office for the loss of your favourite old comic (in the local paper). Trust me, it ain’t their fault. They are working like fiends to give you the best newspaper possible, under difficult circumstances. Cut them some slack. ….
“Then, if you want a healthy daily paper in your town, subscribe. Steel your resolve, pick up your credit card and pony up.”
Yes, that’s right. Just buy the newspaper and it is your fault if you don’t. Never mind that the corporation that owns it has cut news-gathering resources in half over the last 10 or 15 years because a 10 t o 15 per cent profit margin wasn’t good enough for its shareholders. It wanted 20, then 25 then 30, then you can easily figure out that there is hardly going to be enough reporters and editors left to put out a decent paper.
It’s why so many of my former newspaper colleagues and I are out here now exploring opportunities in the new media. And it is why the new media, where writers are willing to launch sites like this out of a passion for covering the news in their communities, even before they have a hope of ever making a living from them, will ultimately prevail.
To read Huffington Post publisher Arianna Huffington’s full speech at the Washington, D.C conference. Click on http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/journalism-2009-desperate_b_374642.html
For further information on the launch of Niagara At Large, see the column below and click on the ‘About Niagara At Large’. ‘Comments Policy’, and ‘Be a Contributor’ tabs at the top of the site’s home page.
Well put Doug. Inasmuch as I avoid Huffington’s Web site because I loath her politics she’s spot on regarding newspapers chasing customers away.
I used to work in print media; now I’m in the process of earning my teaching credential so I can teach and earn a respectable living instead of poverty wages that newspapers still pay.
I’ve written on the dearth of local news in local newspapers. Now as a consumer of the news, I’m very disappointed that I can’t obtain the level of local news in my community that I would expect from my local newspaper. Mine here in California, which is owned by Gannett, shut the doors on its local office and consolidated in a nearby town. Now we get homogenized news that reads like the larger town instead of reporting on the city in which I live. Funny too since my local paper, the Tulare Advance Register, once generated for Gannett a profit margin in excess of 40 percent. Even though we have another print product that comes out weekly, it’s cluster of local owners have an equally sad opinion of what successful local news ought to be. There’s nothing there that is, at all, embarrassing to the local business community or prominent business members who are in political favor with the politically-connected here in town.
I don’t know if you saw the Cato Institute article on this subject, but it’s titled: “A Free Press Only Counts if It’s on Dead Trees.” You might want to read it.