Another vicious circle: Alas for the Merc
It’s no secret traditional newspapers are having a hard time. The San Jose Mercury News, my local paper, has been sold twice in the last few years, and has announced several rounds of layoffs.
But I think they’re going about things the wrong way:
- Paper is losing money.
- Paper lays off personnel and cuts features.
- Subscribers complain about fewer features, and cancel their subscriptions.
- Rinse and repeat.
They’ve cut out the Perspective section from the Sunday paper, reduced the Sunday comics from six pages to four, and for months now the Monday paper has had about half the page count it would have had a few years ago. In particular, the last few days the paper has felt awfully skimpy.
It’s been a long time since I learned about a current event from the Merc, but I still enjoy reading the paper (those rare times when I have enough time to do more than scan the front page headlines and skim through the living and business sections). The Merc has won two Pulitzers and many other prestigious awards; some of their series are excellent (including their recent eye-opening coverage of the juvenile dependency court).
Offering depth of coverage, a variety of opinions, detailed analysis, and clear graphics, physical newspapers remain remarkably relevant during morning rituals like eating breakfast cereal and commuting — but the nationwide decline in subscribers and advertising revenue mark an industry in transition. The strategy so far is consolidation and cost-cutting — and that’s not working.
So how to break the vicious cycle and turn it virtuous? I don’t claim to have answers, but the current approach definitely ain’t it. You can rarely cut your way to success. Trimming features while raising the price only accelerates subscriber churn.
Reinventing the journalism business model (to garner payments from wire services and online news aggregators) is the top task, and it won’t happen overnight. It’s going to take bold strokes from the new owners pursuing new revenue sources. Good luck with that.
UPDATE, 3/7: Add one round of layoff, as reported here.
March 5th, 2008 at 10:38 am
I still subscribe, and read it almost every day. It’s nothing like it used to be. I’ve been noticing a new trick recently - pages that are only half as wide as normal. At first I thought it was a printing error, but it’s supposed to be that way.
I wish the local and tech sections were bigger - I get national and world news from the Internet anyway. I heard that Dean Takahashi got a new job somewhere else, and he’s about half the content in the tech section. We’ll see what happens…
March 5th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
It’s always boggled my mind how subpar their tech coverage used to be. In the ’80s and ’90s, as tech startups and Silicon Valley legends were formed, their coverage always seemed haphazard to me. What a golden opportunity wasted — to interview Jobs or Hewlett/Packard or Moore in their early years. There was hardly any of that.
Then, sometime around 2000, they revamped their tech coverage and it was much better.
March 9th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
I worry that the people in the newspaper business have it wrong. Sam Zell just bought Tribune. If I was him, I would have moved to turn his chain of regional papers into a single national newspaper. I think that is the only chance that they would have had. That way they could keep quality reporting and drive down overhead. One without the other will kill the news paper. The New York Times is growing as a national newspaper. If one of the big chains tried to compete this way, they would eat their lunch.
Part of the problem is that they have no idea how to change their revenue streams.