When I was a Communications student from 1999-2004 the hot button issue was media consolidation. WSU invited all kinds of people to come to our school to talk about the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
We had Ted Turner, we had the owner of the Oregonian, someone from the Wall Street Journal (has since been bought by Rupert Murdoch), the owner of the Seattle Times … all those people came to tell us the sky was falling as a result of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 - although at the time it didn’t necessarily seem like it!
I remember specifically - the owner of the Seattle Times spoke about the importance of having two newspaper cities. For him it appeared to be a question of values. An old fashioned value … set in stone years before I was even born.
At the time, the Seattle Times was spending a lot of money to keep the Seattle PI afloat. It was some strange agreement between the two and it sounded like once the Times agreed to it, they couldn’t wiggle out of it. After all they weren’t propping up another local paper … they were propping up a newspaper owned by Hearst … Hearst being a huge corporation that owned tons of media outlets.
I always remember thinking this was so strange! The small family owned newspaper was propping up a huge corporation … I remember thinking Hearst was making the Seattle PI fail if only to drive the Seattle Times out of business!
In recent months we’ve had several newspapers fail … The Rocky Mountain News, The Seattle PI, and The San Francisco Chronicle is rumored to be next. What do these three papers have in common?
They are all owned by Hearst!
QUESTION:
So, are these newspapers really failing, or is Hearst trying to cut costs because they are in over their heads with too many media outlets? Does Hearst have a crappy conservative business model? Does Hearst Corporate not understand the markets they operate in?
People are using the internet and blogging/bloggers as a scapegoat for newspapers failing. I don’t think this is the case at all! It’s solely media consolidation. These big corporations are at fault! I hate to sound like the treehugging hippie of the hour, but it’s true people! In every other industry social media technologies are helping savvy businesses expand their reach … but not in the newspaper industry?
It’s because there are too few people are thinking about and trying to solve the problem. Whereas before you might have 500 family owned newspapers in major cities creatively thinking outside the box, now you have a few.
In defense, you might argue that independent newspapers are also cutting jobs and failing across the country.
“The Seattle Times just laid off 12% of their workforce. The Oregonian just laid a bunch of people off. High Times Magazine laid people off. Hugh Heffner is just getting laid … ”
Good for you, you can read the headlines.
However, we’re also in a recession and many businesses are doing the same thing.
While I agree that newspaper businesses might need to think of a newer business model in today’s society - I don’t think the internet is causing them to fail.
Consider this ….
With the creation of MP3’s, another revolutionizing digital technology, we saw the music industry go topsy turvy as well.
It wasn’t because digital technology was the great Satan. It was because the digital technology empowered the people. More people were able to start recording projects because they could afford the equipment to do so. They could send their music through the internet, and MP3’s began mutating into a promotional tool versus a commodity to be bought and sold. The business model changed. New record labels sprouted up all across the nation. With them came new business models and new small businesses owners … creators of the majority of jobs in this country.
The few major labels in existence spent their energy (and money) suing Napster and individual people instead of reinventing their business models. As a result, they were crippled - one by one.
It’s because they got too big. It’s because the power was concentrated in too few.
Kinda like what happened in this financial meltdown, eh?
