GFC anyone? (first of some midlife ramblings)
So I’m writing this down because it has been bouncing around the back of my head for some time now.
I have been (mostly) blessed to have spent the last 20 years of my life working for The New York Times. This newspaper, and indeed nothing else more epitomizes what a newspaper is than the Times, has allowed me some semblance of a definable “career”. I have learned and almost mastered the business side of newspapering including ad sales/marketing, circulation, technology & project management and much more. I have made a decent if unspectacular income, and I have been able to indulge in many non vocational pursuits that have brought me amazing amounts of joy.
Thing is if you hadn’t noticed this industry is in big trouble. Print publishing is an industrial business and extremely capital cost intensive one at that. Raw materials and labor only cost more as time goes on (even ink is a goddamn petrochemical product…maybe we could switch to soy). Obviously the internet has changed the media landscape and print in particular, but I dont think that the newspaper is going to die out like the dinosaurs. It may however kill specific companies in the business though. Let’s talk about scalability for a moment If a newspaper wishes to add 10,000 readers, there are the paper and ink, delivery and associated costs of delivering that many more units every single day (and those costs only increase with time). If a website wishes to add 10,000 more customers—well I think you can add a top line server for maybe $2-3K. Beyond that, nothing ( well electricity ) Running an electronic media company seems to be a better proposition than a tree killing one.
I dont blame people for not advertising (especially classified advertising) in print, but I also don’t believe that the ipod or amazon e-book reader is going to replace dirty old newsprint at all. The hierarchy is being re-shuffled and newspapers are going to adjust to a diminished role, just as radio was forced to do in the late 40’s. The scary part is what are called legacy costs. A successful company will pare costs through increased efficiencies, so a modern NY Times will be able to produce the same amount of newspapers with less personnel than it did 40 yrs ago. The pension obligations (of those former employees) are always paid by current employees, so now we’ve got obligations to the retirees of a 20,000 employee corporation and only 10,000 ( hypothetical ) current employees to pay in to the system. Ouch. Truly legenday corporate giants ( Bethlehem Steel, General Motors) were undone not so much by their failures in the capitalist marketplace; they were squeezed and eventually crushed by the obligations born of their labor-heavy, low-tech pasts.
enough for the moment more to come
