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Newspapers IV
(August 18, 2001) So, what is the future for the newspapers? It boils down to understanding that there is no relationship between cost and revenue in the current business model. Like an alcoholic just before her first meeting, the newspapers are going to have to admit they have a deeply rooted problem. Soul and body, as in alcoholism, are detached from each other. Solving this question leads to a resolution of the Employment advertising issue. Solving one without the other is liking quitting drink without a program for accompanying change. Employment advertising (or recruiting services) are the cash cow of the industry and will develop once treated as such. Unlike most businesses, the newspapers have a culture that believes in keeping paying customers explicitly away from the actual product. This weird compartmentalization is accompanied by a similar barrier to readers/subscribers at the opposite end of the information distribution channel. Like most psychological disorders, the answer is in the integration of the two opposing sides of the personality. Like a slow moving pendulum, the role of the newspapers has shifted from propaganda arm of the government (post-war to Watergate) to investigative arm of the government (Watergate until now) to today's juncture. In the first two incarnations, centralized operations, a unified voice and a Jeffersonian distance between readers and customers alike were smart adaptive features. The future, however, involves the recognition that the new market simultaneously emphasizes and de-emphasizes the benefits of geography and centralization. Markets are fracturing, technology rewards smaller operations, local is global and so on.
It is not dissimilar to the quandary faced by railroad executives at the dawn of the 20th century. They found it impossible to comprehend that their future lay in a world with much smaller units of production (car vs train), larger expenditures per customer (a ticket vs a purchase of a car), less control over the process (rails vs roads) and centralized management (the scheduling to make the trains run on time) would be replaced by supply chain management (ultimately) as the critical element of operations. The metaphor is more than a little on target. The future of the newspapers lies in smaller units, closer ties to customers, different funding approaches, decentralized management and networks of humans and computers. It is more responsive and personal. It is not a broadcast media.
The question is not "how do we adapt our organizational and capital structures to a new reality" anymore than that would have answered the question for the railroads. The question is "Given the fact that the employment transaction is at the heart of our enterprise, how do we make it more effective?". For the railroads, the trick would have been understanding that they were in the "transportation" business. For the newspapers, it's the employment business. Unfortunately, they have so completely identified themselves with their current product (as with the railroads) that there is no internal expertise. It's the Innovator's Dilemma writ large.The top 10 things we know about the future of the newspaper:
- All readers work, care about work and think about work.
- All customers (advertisers) hire, usually readers.
- Customers are adjusting to real and sustained labor shortages.
- Readers and customers are adjusting to a project centric work place and need lots of help.
- Work itself is changing.
- Winning back the younger readers (a key issue) will involve deep investment.
- Profit centers (business units) will be increasingly small. There will be more of them.
- Journalists will know their customers intimately.
- Some of the cash flow in a profit center will be unrelated to journalism.
- Software is a form of media, not a business or product line.
That's the future for the newspapers: fast, cheap, profitable individually and in the aggregate, out of control, customer-centric, decentralized and driven by revenues from employment transactions.
- John Sumser © TwoColorHat. All Rights Reserved.Talent is what matters most.
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Index (ERI)
- 2003 HCI
- 2002 ERI
- 2001 ERI
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- 1997 ERI
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Branding Presentation
- Recruiting Then/Now
Public Companies
in Electronic Recruiting
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Materials written
by John Sumser
© TwoColorHat.
All Rights Reserved.