So what are journalism professors, those charged with grooming the
next generation of reporters, editors and producers, telling their
students these days about the news business in general, and print
journalism, that seemingly most endangered of species, in particular?
“I’m telling my students to find a new profession,” says
journalism Professor Tony Chan of the University of Washington at
Seattle.
“Print, as we know it, is dead. Kaput,” he adds. “Print is ‘Dead Man Walking.'”
The first time I heard this was in 1995, when I was in college, and the batshit crazy professor who said it to me said we’d all be out of work in a year. Newspapers would have to go online, thus cutting most of their costs, and step two may have been unclear but step three was clearly profit. Thirteen years ago, we were all gonna be flying around in our jetpacks reading news on a thing attached to our brains, jacked in like that hose in the Matrix, by this point. Yet here we are. Newspapers all over the place.
Most of them making, as I’ve posted before, a FUCKTON of money:
reader; it covers the first three quarters (periods 1-9) of 2007. The
reader asked to remain anonymous, citing possible repercussions if
identified. The reader did not have more current data, for 2008.Andthe reader requested I not share copies of the report with anyone.
Green Bay: No. 1 at 42.5%
The numbers are startling — especially now, with Gannett poised tolay off perhaps thousands of newspaper workers next week in another bid to boost the company’s flaggingstock. Every newspaper except Detroit’s was profitable a year ago — although some, just barely so.
TheGreen Bay Press-Gazette was the star. It had the single-highest profit margin: 42.5%. In other words, Green Bay
kept 43 cents of every dollar it took in. The paper’s total ad revenue
over the three quarters: $25 million. The report doesn’t disclose
circulation revenue for any paper. Applied only to ad revenue, then, Green Bay made around $10.6 million during the period.
If you or I owned a business that performed like this, we would buy Barbados and spend the rest of our lives stinking drunk.
At the time I was told print would be dead in a year, plenty of very serious people were very concerned about the Internet, and I’m not saying they were wrong to be concerned. I am saying they were wrong to manage their money as if there was no Internet, no possible threat to their business, and to demand greater and greater profits from an industry that quite frankly, with as many proclamations of death as it has faced, should be grateful to be alive and in decent health.
Will print be dead a year from now? No. Certain newspapers, the victims of terrible management, rapacious greed and years of being run by people I wouldn’t swerve around in my car, will be dead a year from now. Which is horrific by itself; having closed a newspaper, I can’t even read the stories about theSeattle Post-Intelligencer without feeling nauseous, but it’s not the same as saying print is dead, or even that newspapers are dead.
A.