Safe bet that anyone who owns a pica pole – that ingenious, understated tool belonging to an era now gone with the wind – also has a dead newspaper drawer.
Mine is in the basement storage area, in an ancient chest of drawers from my childhood, carved with my full name in upper right corner of top surface.
No clue what drove the need to use my pocketknife on a decent piece of furniture, but at least there is no doubt that this is MY dead newspaper drawer.
Yours may be in a similar spot, or it may be in the closet in the spare bedroom, packed away in a paper bag in the dark so the newsprint fades ever so slowly. But still gone with the wind.
We could all share notes and dissect the contents but it is all the same, whether the death was in Atlanta, Dallas or Detroit, or any point in between.
There’s the last edition, saved in full and carefully stored, laid to rest. There’s the initial announcement – just the newspaper clipping – of the planned closing. If you were a manager, there may be a parting “carry on and have a good life” note, one that you read ever so often when you want to stray from basement-cleaning efforts.
It brings back the memories, but you move on, back to basement cleaning. We all move on.
There are three occupants in my drawer.
First is a fine newspaper whose death 20-plus years ago pre-dated the current string of papers that succumbed to a fatal case of “digital transition failure.” Its death was attributable to a good old-fashioned newspaper war, basically two big media companies bludgeoning each other until one backed away.
Next is a post 9-11 victim, The Atlanta Journal, one of the few afternoon metro papers that made it into the new century. The fragile economy and changing readership habits finally forced editors to change the classic slogan on the mast, on its final day, to “Covered Dixie Like the Dew.”
Third in the drawer is a corporate/centralized web strategy and support team, built to support a big media company’s newspapers, half of which went on the sales block three-plus years ago. Fewer newspapers, no big support group needed. Welcome to the drawer.
The forces that drive a paper to the brink, and beyond, are different in practically every case. Sometimes it’s debt. Sometimes it’s quality. Sometimes it’s loss of touch with its readership. Sometimes it’s competition. Sometimes it’s failure to adapt to changing distribution modes. Rarely is it a cookie-cutter reason.
But after the big shutdown following the crash of 2008, is the culling of the herd slowing, or coming to an end?
Look around the industry and more and more papers are coming to terms with digital, and bringing in 15 to 20 percent of revenue from that area – and in not all cases is that percentage high simply because print revenues are declining.
Because they had to be, newspapers are more lean and efficient than ever. Bankruptcy restructuring has played out in numerous cases, and a new business model starts to emerge in others.
The industry isn’t by any stretch out of the woods yet; there is still a lot of denial out there, and some still look over their shoulders for the good ol’ days to return.
There are more issues than solutions: how do we sell digital, how do we structure the organization to succeed as print revenue declines, what do we do about social media, how do we pick up the speed and pace, what systems and infrastructure do we need in a digital world to be efficient and succeed, how do we put the emphasis on digital first and still serve print needs, how do we develop a strategy and plan for an increasingly digital world.
More on that to come.
Almost every day I talk with a publisher, a vendor, an ad director, an editor who is excited about the future. Many times I run into others with a glass-is-half empty feeling. But not as often.
After all the bloodletting, cutbacks and trauma of recent years, is optimism too strong of a word?
Probably, but there is a reality from many in the industry that maybe this can work, and maybe there is a transition approach that will keep newspapers alive and kicking, even if print is not the dominant delivery method.
Time to get on with fixing the problem, not bemoaning today’s issues.
Let’s get on with the fix, because my Dead Newspaper Drawer is already stuffed to the brim.
And I’m not moving my rock collection from the other drawers.
(This blog was originally posted on www.naa.org, the Newspaper Association of America web site.)