The same day the New York Times ran this depressing story detailing everything bad about the newspaper business – dropping circulation, constant management changes, drastic staff cuts, etc. – my local paper had a story about how bad sales were at major department store chains in December and January. Coincidence? I think not.
As the Times story points out, departments stores and newspapers grew up together over the past century and good times at one fueled good times at the other. Now both are on a downward spiral. Macy’s reported a 7.1 percent drop in same-store sales during January, leading them to announce a reorganization and layoff.
Department stores are just one category of advertiser that’s doing less print and more online advertising and causing major damage at newspapers as a result. Craig’s List, online real estate listing services, and eBay among others have decimated papers’ classified advertising sections, causing papers to take drastic steps like cutting staff and slicing or dropping sections.
Some papers are managing to crank out the hits despite curtailed budgets and staff. For purely selfish reasons, I’m happy one is my hometown paper, The Oregonian in Portland. The paper’s dynamic duo of Editor Sandy Rowe and Executive Editor Peter Bhatia have been there 15 years – that’s more like 100 in newspaper editor years – and recently were recently named Editors of the Year by Editor & Publisher, the newspaper industry magazine.
During that time, the Oregonian won 5 Pulitzers and was a finalist 14 times. The paper’s owned by Advance Publications, a privately held communications company that also owns Conde Nast, Fairchild, American City Business Journals and 19 other newspapers. Without public financial records to check, it’s difficult to assess exactly what kind of shape Advance’s newspaper business is in. What’s visibly apparent: on certain days of the week the Oregonian’s pretty skinny, and they’ve started folding the business section into the news section, following a trend at other papers.
On the other hand, the Oregonian’s local news and sports coverage is consistently in-depth, informative and entertaining, and the investigative team is as good as any in the country, thus the prizes. The paper has actively pursued new ventures including producing a couple glossy lifestyle magazines like Exploring the Pearl, and has a home and garden magazine in the works. The paper’s Website could be better; the search function is particularly awful. But the Oregonian’s attempts at getting the general public engaged in the news process as bloggers and on online message boards has been successful.
I have to say that newspaper owners have no one to blame but themselves. I’ve watched them attend trade shows, conferences since the early 90s’ and they talked up a storm but never really seemed to get what was really going on with the net and how it would impact their business. The winners are really the one’s who were not afraid of change and struck deals and went into new ventures. The handwriting has been on the wall for a very long time.
Thanks for weighing in on this. I couldn’t agree more. I was on staff at the OC Register during the early and mid-1990s when management was starting to look at the online world. To its credit, the paper created an online presence fairly early, but it was pretty divorced from the newsroom: my assigning editor became the Website editor and immediately moved to a different office. At the time, the company was investing much more time and money in a 24/7 regional TV news channel. I think part of the problem was the constant need to churn out a daily product and the group-think mentality limited how quickly anyone was able or willing to move. The people who got it all left by the mid-1990s, many for digital news jobs elsewhere.