The Tribune company’s Chicago Tribune is laying off 20% of its newsroom. That’s got to hurt.
The Boston Globe is asking itself: What went wrong? The Globe belongs to the New York Times company, which publishes the eponymous paper.
Not to be outdone, the NYT itself was the victim of a great piece / hit job by Vanity Fair, which by the way, very well could be the best magazine out there (despite the fact that the rag now publishes, oh I’d say 2 articles per issue, apparently), if anyone still read magazines, that is.
Anyway, for what it’s worth, I think it’s absurd to blame newspapers for not “doing more sooner”. The more they would have done, the sooner they would have shrunk their businesses and gone out of business. Seriously, would the train companies really fared better had they dived into the airline business? Probably not. Would record labels really be bigger companies generating more revenues if they dove into digital music? Nope.
The truth is: before the Web came around, companies profited because they took advantage of an inefficiency.
Newspapers prospered and profited because they exploited the inefficiency of capturing data, aggregating it all, then publishing it to the masses. At its core, the web flattens the world and removed that inefficiency. It creates others and others are exploiting those inefficiencies. Google is doing it one way, Amazon in another, Apple yet another… and in our own little way, WatchMojo.com in yet another. That is how innovation and entrepreneurship works.
Here’s a fact: you don’t need that many people to do a job that you used to need to do the same job, thanks to the Web.
The newspapers are bloated, and I cannot think of any other 150 year old industry that wouldn’t be. Unless they are willing to accept massively leaner company structures, smaller top lines and probably lower bottom lines, I don’t think they will survive. It is a shame, it is a loss, but isn’t this what capitalism is all about? Aren’t these the “freedoms we fight for?”
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