A while back, I posted something called The Day the Newspapers Died. That day seems closer today. Over the week end, the San Francisco Chronicle announced that it would cut 80 reporters and 20 editors or one-fourth of staff in coming months. A cursory glance of the newspapers finances will tell you that this move is unlikely to be enough to save the paper's life. Since Hearst Corp bought it in 2000, it has lost over $330 million on its investment, and an estimated $25 million in the first quarter of this year.
Sooner or later it adds up.
The 100 members of the editorial staff is just a teaspoon in a very big budget. According to Greg Jarboe, CEO of SEO-PR, has estimated that there are some 75,000 fewer full time jobs in North American journalism today than there were seven years ago when Hearst bought the Chronicle. No one seems to have the total for newspaper losses overall in the past seven years, but I'm certain it is one of those take-your-breath-away numbers you usually see in government budgets.
This is not a good thing and a few gloating bloggers seem pretty myopic in what they are writing. The world is not a better, safer, freer place when newspapers shutter up, when trained information gathering organizations are disbursed, it is not a very good thing at all.
The are questions. Can the trend be stopped? I don't think so, for a few reasons. First is the arrogance of those running traditional big media organizations. When I attended WeMedia in January this year and actually met some of the people who run America's largest media companies. Many of them impressed me as an arrogant lot who have their heads so deeply buried in the sand that they are unaware of how the position exposes their buttocks. An executive of one chain referred to the loss of classified revenue to online resources as a "long down cycle that will turn around." Another explained to me that media companies liked print better because they made an average of $90 per print subscriber per year, versus only $5 to $6 per online user per year.
Second, history favors disruption from new companies over course corrections from incumbents who tend to disdain and deny disruption until it is too late.
What comes next? There's a great deal going on in the area of citizen journalism and much will emerge. With our camera phones and handheld devices we humans have the ability to record pretty much everything, everywhere. That is a great capability, but without some organization all that data being dumped on the Internet all the time will be about as useful as reading a stage coach schedule and as interesting as watching paint dry.
Topix.net has started to build an interesting framework for braiding traditional and citizen journalism on a highly localized plane. It is still primitive. There is no space for citizen photagraphy and you cannot subscribe through RSS to the locations relevant to you. But you can see where Topix can go. And if you imagine live video feeds coming in from Ustreamers onto Topix, you start to see a model for a new kind of organized news service, one that shed the baggage of loyalty to the way it used to be.
Topix is but one example. There are many things starting in many places. The survivors of today's newspaper business will not disdain or resent them. They will embrace them and they better do it sooner rather than later, before it is too late.
