The Boston Celtics couldn’t pull it off… but I am thinking of getting a movement going to get fans and a number of wealthy individuals, along with companies, to acquire a share in the Montreal Canadiens hockey team.
Details to come, but here is the background, from our sports blog.
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WatchMojo NewsletterI finished reading Kenneth Whyte’s The Uncrowned King on William Randolph Hearst, and I learned a lot about how to be a better businessman and entrepreneur, no doubt. Hearst was the man, for sure.
But I also walk away now realizing that newspapers as (we know them) will die, no matter how much of a fight they put up.
From the last pages of the book:
“The 20th century brought an extended (and ongoing) era of profit-taking and consolidation. Advertising came to dwarf circulation as a source of newspaper revenue, and advertisers found it more cost-effective to reach a whole reading public with one or two ad placements than with many.
The big papers got richer, the smaller ones disappeared, to the point where many metropolitan dailies enjoyed local monopolies. With reduced competition, newspapers lowered their voices and brought in their elbows.
The aggressive, crusading, politically charged, self-promoting, polarizing, audience building antics of the old warrior owner-editors gave way to to the relatively bland consensual habits of the business manager who wanted only as many readers as would keep his advertisers happy.”
What is the problem? There are two.
- The Web has cut into their audiences, and
- advertising is more effective online…
The Web will keep eating away at newspaper audiences and revenues, and if/when newspapers get serious about moving to the Web, then they accelerate their inevitable demise.
In the 1950s, television ushered in even greater reach, so the appeal of placing ads in most newspapers vanished. I think the papers who did not die when the penny presses merged and subsequently closed in the 1950s will probably go out of business by first merging and then selling this time around.
In the 2000s, the Web offered more by way of local tastes. The myth that newspapers “master” local content is a myth. They’re not bad at it, but they took advantage of an inefficiency. The Web leveled the playing field and made marketing more efficient. This fundamentally pierces through any vestige newspapers had.
Newspapers will die, news will go on… News companies have a choice to make.
