If the newspaper industry made pizza
I read this article in the American Journalism Review a few weeks ago, and it’s kept me irritated ever since. At first, I wasn’t sure what bothered me about the twentysomethings working at the Charlotte Observer referring to the newspaper as a “dying industry.”
Finally, it hit me: No one in Charlotte was going to say “OK, I know all the news I’ll ever need to know, no more news for me.” Charlotteans still want to read news, but the newspaper industry doesn’t want to sell it to them except in one format they’ve been using for two centuries.
Other industries don’t do this. If the customer says they want X, and you’re trying to sell them Y, you change your product to resemble Y or discover a new market for X.
Take, for example, someone who doesn’t like pepperoni pizza (Jenn is one of these). The pizza industry is happy to sell her a cheese pizza. Every pizza place from a neighborhood restaurant like Pasco’s to a big national chain like California Pizza Kitchen is thrilled to offer her an alternative to pepperoni pizza — most even are happy to sell entirely different sorts of food as well.
In contrast, here’s how it would go with the newspaper industry:
Customer: I don’t want to eat pepperoni pizza.
Newspaper industry: That’s not true. Your parents loved pepperoni pizza. So did your grandparents. Eat up.
Customer: No, seriously, I’m a vegetarian. Do you have maybe just a plain cheese pizza?
Newspaper industry: OK, we hear you on the pepperoni pizza. We’ve decided to use smaller pepperonis. Aren’t they cute and easier to eat?
Customer: Enough kidding around. I love pizza, but I don’t want a pepperoni pizza. Do you maybe have one with mushrooms?
Newspaper industry: You know what? Just for you, I’m going to cut the pepperoni into star shapes. That’s what kids today like, right? We’ll advertise the new pepperoni shape on the Internet!
Customer: Do you have a pizza with vegetables instead?
Newspaper industry: No, but we’ve totally redesigned our pizza to be more colorful. You like that, don’t you? Have a pepperoni pizza!
Customer: I’m out of here.
Newspaper industry: Damn you, Internet!
I know, it’s a strained analogy, but when I read stuff like this, it just makes me nuts:
Especially discouraging is the generational flight from newspapers by their peers. Daily readership for people aged 25 to 34 plunged from 77 percent in 1970 to 35 percent last year, according to Newspaper Association of America figures. A study last year by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that just 22 percent of those under 30 had read a print newspaper the previous day.
“Out of all my friends, single or married, about my age, one of them gets the paper, and he only gets it on weekends,” says reporter Deborah Hirsch, 24, who covers adjacent York County, South Carolina. “Everybody thinks it’s cool to know a reporter, but when it comes to do they really care or are they reading on a daily basis, the answer is no.”
While several still swear by ink-on-paper, most of those I interviewed prefer to read the paper online. Several admitted neglecting or not even subscribing to the paper version. “I subscribe,” says clerk-reporter Emily Benton, 24, “but I’ll be honest. They pile up outside my door on weekdays.”
News is everywhere on the Internet. I suspect the Associated Press has never done better than it has in the Internet age, where it’s almost obligatory on any information-heavy Web site. People love the news.
Fetishizing the old format only makes sense for the folks working in the press room, who have a real reason to be concerned. But they shouldn’t have to: Pizza Hut is owned by the same company that owns KFC and Taco Bell. If one of those three companies has a bad year (say e. coli shows up at some restaurants), no one talks about Pizza Hut and KFC going down with the ship. The three entities are separate businesses (normally) and they operate independently from one another.
Most newspapers that print their own papers also print products from other customers. The Daily Press in Victorville also publishes Ray Pryke’s newspapers, the Senior News and several other products. I don’t have access to all the numbers, but I suspect that for most newspapers, spinning off the printing press would turn out to be a pretty viable business strategy. The printing press would be a viable company on its own and be free to innovate — and price — as it needed to. The newspaper could be just one of its customers and, if print numbers started to dwindle (and they will, the only question is when most publications will be primarily Web products with a hardcopy reprint edition), it will survive and continue to contribute to the corporation’s bottom line. (And if it can’t, it can be sold to someone who can figure out how to do it instead.)
The media division would then be free to focus on its mission: Creating news and either finding advertisers to continue to subsidize its free/cheap delivery to consumers or finding another economic model that makes sense. (The Daily Press’ e-paper is one such experiment.)
In 10 years, I firmly believe there won’t be newspapers, radio stations, TV stations or news sites as we currently know them. All of them will be “media companies,” with fingers in multiple pies. The Washington Post has bought the radio station I knew as B-106 in my high school days, the Daily Press is experimenting with a daily newscast on the Web and the Press-Enterprise is aggressively promoting its Web site as a regional source of news.
Change isn’t death. I’m tired hearing people in the newspaper industry trying to equate the two. On-paper newspapers won’t ever fully disappear, even it only exists as something a consumer prints on its own. A newspaper is more than the method in which it’s delivered, and it’s ridiculous that so many in the industry is so emotionally invested in the medium instead of the content.
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