Print will save the Newspaper industry

By Lincoln Millstein

I’ve got news for the newspaper industry.

Your future is in the hands of the print newspaper and not in the killing fields of digital media. If you think you are smarter than the folks at Rocket Fuel, which just saw its valuation plummet from $2 billion to $145 million, or at AOL and Yahoo, the erstwhile giants who are now being morphed into a smaller enterprise called Oath, or at any number of digital publishers desperately hanging on as the Duopoly chokes off the blood supply, then you are truly drunk on your own press releases.

I know, because I was there, giving birth to boston.com and then off to New York to resuscitate nytimes.com during the crash of 2001–2002. I stirred the drink and promulgated the “digital first” mantra, a fatuous promise if there ever was one, as if an eponymous change could cure our ills.

Almost 25 years into this “experiment,” I get feint nausea when I hear publisher after publisher, and worse, editor after editor, talk about how they are retooling their entire organization to adapt to this digital future.

And taking the precious resources out of their core print product to do so, even though most newspapers still get two-thirds of their revenue from print.

The latest is the missive from Gerald Baker, the titular head of the Wall Street Journal newsroom who wrote that WSJ editors must re-apply for new jobs defined by its latest reorg.

“Reorg” — now that’s a word which has crept into our lexicon without much warning, but with much foreboding. It means that “since we don’t really know what is going to happen, we’ve decided to shake things up a bit.” Unfortunately, it signals another unintended message: panic. The WSJ is panicking, along with the New York Times, Gannett and a host of other companies more worried about how to keep their stock prices growing than about sustaining their publishing legacies.

I’ve got news for these companies: The stock market is a futures market which rewards growth companies. You need to come to terms that you are not a growth industry. You are cannibalizing your only differentiating asset — your print newsrooms — for a future in which you are not a king maker, but an observer, and a marginal one at that. Gannett has so depleted its local news operations, it is committing journalism malpractice. It is stealing those resources to prop up a brand that has virtually no consumer demand — USA Today — and hoping to calibrate a national sales strategy around it. In the meantime, it is destroying its viable local connections and products. So it’s no surprise that Gannett was the only large newspaper company in the first six months of 2017 which showed a significant decline in subscription revenue — almost 8 percent — compared with growth at NYT, WashPo, WSJ, Hearst, McClatchy and even tronc.

Still, the New York Times is deconstructing its vaunted editing infrastructure to fund dubious digital initiatives. The world does not need another cooking app. I love Melissa Clark, but quite frankly, when I need to make a pasta dish, I find dozens of professional Italian chefs eager to help me on YouTube, for free. The Times newspaper hasn’t seen any significant innovation in the 15 years it’s gone through four executive editors.

Compare that with what’s happening at the Washington Post, where owner Jeff Bezos has added 140 journalists since he acquired the paper in 2013.

When he took over, Bezos said, the newsroom kept eliminating people. “What they needed was a little bit of runway and the encouragement to experiment, and to stop shrinking. You can’t shrink your way into relevance,” Bezos said. “We’ve grown our way into profitability instead of shrinking our way into profitability.”

Except for the Post, the industry is otherwise squandering a rare opportunity — the deus ex machina of fake news and the mess in Washington — which has resulted in the biggest increase in subscriptions to newspapers and their digital versions in more than two decades. It is a time to harness the value of the most trusted media, with our foot patrol of reporters who prowl the halls of municipal offices looking for any nugget which might interest a reader — the news consumer.

I cut my teeth as a reporter for the Hartford Courant. I walked the beat every day in the city hall and courthouse in Middletown, Connecticut, where I would try to sneak a peak into the mayor’s calendar when his secretary wasn’t looking, bribe the court clerk with scotch so he would read me back juicy transcripts, flirt with the planning board clerk who filed all the building applications and download all the gossip from the loquacious health inspector. For sure I was not a Pulitzer-winning reporter for the Times or Post with under-secretaries of state and the like as sources. But I was doing a job my customers valued and could not do themselves. Do local reporters even walk beats any more? Or do they sit in their cubicles, emailing, texting, posting and browsing their way to fill their pages?

Most importantly, I presented my findings in a century-old format, trusted because it has a permanence to it, trusted because it took 24 hours to produce — not 30 seconds with the tap of an index finger — trusted because the process of story generation, fact finding, sourcing, writing and redacting by some sullen, uncompromising gatekeeper called a copy editor only made my final product better for its accuracy, its illuminosity and its revelatory surprise. And trusted because it was on paper. There are many studies and research on newspapers as more trusted than almost any other media.

Digital media has its place. Its mobility and real time delivery of news are special indeed. But it’s not a replacement, nor a salvation, for print. The book industry cycled through this and there is much to learn there. After a decade of decline, print books began a comeback at the end of 2014 and ebooks began a decline. By the end of 2016, ebooks were declining 11 percent in sales while print books were increasing at 4 percent.

And here is another startling fact: According to a study by Pew Research, 18–29 year olds are more likely to read print books than any other generation. And 25 percent of college students prefer to buy print textbooks even when they can get the ebooks for free.

Chantal Restivo-Alessi, the chief digital officer for Harper Collins said holding the price for the hardcover is important for the industry to establish value. Once you start to discount for that core product, or eliminate it, pricing becomes a slippery slope for the paperback and ebooks.

This is an extremely important data point for newspaper publishers. In a world without print, you’re subject to the vagaries of a perpetually disruptive marketplace. I would not want to take that gamble.

“This industry spent 20 years teaching everyone in the world that news should be free,” Bezos said. “The truth is, readers are smarter than that. They know high-quality journalism is expensive to produce, and they are willing to pay for it, but you have to ask them. We’ve tightened our paywall, and every time we’ve tightened our paywall, subscriptions go up.”

After predictions of the death of the print newspaper in America for 25 years, more than 1300 are still publishing every day. The New York Times sells to more than 1 million print buyers, the Houston Chronicle delivers to more than 300,000 homes every Sunday. Thirty million Americans still spend their Sunday mornings with a century old ritual at the kitchen table, front porch, verandas of all sizes, coffee shops, libraries and studies. This is extremely heartening given the massive shift from an advertising reliant business model to a largely subscription-based industry.

The consumer demand is there even though most newspapers are a pretty lousy product, filled with too much content better done by digital media and not enough journalism. What if we actually started to produce a better product, filled with enterprising journalism, on better paper with clear value for the reader, as if every page offered insightful discovery, instead of 30-hour-old canned news sitting on the pages like stale bread.

It will never be 1998 again for American newspapers, nor will they ever see 1999 or 2000 again. They no longer can be all things to all people. That was a brief moment in history when monopoly newspapers were so dominant in their markets that they successfully stretched the product beyond its core mission. Newspapers will have to re-build themselves from scratch, page by page, going back to an era predating advertising — to the early Nineteenth Century when they were a high priced item for the literate and the influential and they co-existed with bloggers (pamphleteers). Only then will advertising return at scale, when marketers fully appreciate the influence of the readership.

Publishers need to examine whether, as an industry guaranteed by our Constitution, they will be satisfied with playing a singular role as a vanguard of freedom in their communities. To sustain that role, they will need to be ruthless about controlling the cost of anything that isn’t journalism. Citizens will continue to pay for protection from tyranny only if they believe newspapers are a true vanguard. As newspapers continue to shrink their journalism resources, the consequences for society — and indeed democracy itself — are great. Journalism is as important now as ever.

Print will save newspapers

By Lincoln Millstein

I’ve got news for the newspaper industry.

Your future is in the hands of the print newspaper and not in the killing fields of digital media. If you think you are smarter than the folks at Rocket Fuel, which just saw its valuation plummet from $2 billion to $145 million, or at AOL and Yahoo, the erstwhile giants who are now being morphed into a smaller enterprise called Oath, or at any number of digital publishers desperately hanging on as the Duopoly chokes off the blood supply, then you are truly drunk on your own press releases.

I know, because I was there, giving birth to boston.com and then off to New York to resuscitate nytimes.com during the crash of 2001–2002. I stirred the drink and promulgated the “digital first” mantra, a fatuous promise if there ever was one, as if an eponymous change could cure our ills.

Almost 25 years into this “experiment,” I get feint nausea when I hear publisher after publisher, and worse, editor after editor, talk about how they are retooling their entire organization to adapt to this digital future.

And taking the precious resources out of their core print product to do so, even though most newspapers still get two-thirds of their revenue from print.

The latest is the missive from Gerald Baker, the titular head of the Wall Street Journal newsroom who wrote that WSJ editors must re-apply for new jobs defined by its latest reorg.

“Reorg” — now that’s a word which has crept into our lexicon without much warning, but with much foreboding. It means that “since we don’t really know what is going to happen, we’ve decided to shake things up a bit.” Unfortunately, it signals another unintended message: panic. The WSJ is panicking, along with the New York Times, Gannett and a host of other companies more worried about how to keep their stock prices growing than about sustaining their publishing legacies.

I’ve got news for these companies: The stock market is a futures market which rewards growth companies. You need to come to terms that you are not a growth industry. You are cannibalizing your only differentiating asset — your print newsrooms — for a future in which you are not a king maker, but an observer, and a marginal one at that. Gannett has so depleted its local news operations, it is committing journalism malpractice. It is stealing those resources to prop up a brand that has virtually no consumer demand — USA Today — and hoping to calibrate a national sales strategy around it. In the meantime, it is destroying its viable local connections and products. So it’s no surprise that Gannett was the only large newspaper company in the first six months of 2017 which showed a significant decline in subscription revenue — almost 8 percent — compared with growth at NYT, WashPo, WSJ, Hearst, McClatchy and even tronc.

Still, the New York Times is deconstructing its vaunted editing infrastructure to fund dubious digital initiatives. The world does not need another cooking app. I love Melissa Clark, but quite frankly, when I need to make a pasta dish, I find dozens of professional Italian chefs eager to help me on YouTube, for free. The Times newspaper hasn’t seen any significant innovation in the 15 years it’s gone through four executive editors.

Compare that with what’s happening at the Washington Post, where owner Jeff Bezos has added 140 journalists since he acquired the paper in 2013.

When he took over, Bezos said, the newsroom kept eliminating people. “What they needed was a little bit of runway and the encouragement to experiment, and to stop shrinking. You can’t shrink your way into relevance,” Bezos said. “We’ve grown our way into profitability instead of shrinking our way into profitability.”

Except for the Post, the industry is otherwise squandering a rare opportunity — the deus ex machina of fake news and the mess in Washington — which has resulted in the biggest increase in subscriptions to newspapers and their digital versions in more than two decades. It is a time to harness the value of the most trusted media, with our foot patrol of reporters who prowl the halls of municipal offices looking for any nugget which might interest a reader — the news consumer.

I cut my teeth as a reporter for the Hartford Courant. I walked the beat every day in the city hall and courthouse in Middletown, Connecticut, where I would try to sneak a peak into the mayor’s calendar when his secretary wasn’t looking, bribe the court clerk with scotch so he would read me back juicy transcripts, flirt with the planning board clerk who filed all the building applications and download all the gossip from the loquacious health inspector. For sure I was not a Pulitzer-winning reporter for the Times or Post with under-secretaries of state and the like as sources. But I was doing a job my customers valued and could not do themselves. Do local reporters even walk beats any more? Or do they sit in their cubicles, emailing, texting, posting and browsing their way to fill their pages?

Most importantly, I presented my findings in a century-old format, trusted because it has a permanence to it, trusted because it took 24 hours to produce — not 30 seconds with the tap of an index finger — trusted because the process of story generation, fact finding, sourcing, writing and redacting by some sullen, uncompromising gatekeeper called a copy editor only made my final product better for its accuracy, its illuminosity and its revelatory surprise. And trusted because it was on paper. There are many studies and research on newspapers as more trusted than almost any other media.

Digital media has its place. Its mobility and real time delivery of news are special indeed. But it’s not a replacement, nor a salvation, for print. The book industry cycled through this and there is much to learn there. After a decade of decline, print books began a comeback at the end of 2014 and ebooks began a decline. By the end of 2016, ebooks were declining 11 percent in sales while print books were increasing at 4 percent.

And here is another startling fact: According to a study by Pew Research, 18–29 year olds are more likely to read print books than any other generation. And 25 percent of college students prefer to buy print textbooks even when they can get the ebooks for free.

Chantal Restivo-Alessi, the chief digital officer for Harper Collins said holding the price for the hardcover is important for the industry to establish value. Once you start to discount for that core product, or eliminate it, pricing becomes a slippery slope for the paperback and ebooks.

This is an extremely important data point for newspaper publishers. In a world without print, you’re subject to the vagaries of a perpetually disruptive marketplace. I would not want to take that gamble.

“This industry spent 20 years teaching everyone in the world that news should be free,” Bezos said. “The truth is, readers are smarter than that. They know high-quality journalism is expensive to produce, and they are willing to pay for it, but you have to ask them. We’ve tightened our paywall, and every time we’ve tightened our paywall, subscriptions go up.”

After predictions of the death of the print newspaper in America for 25 years, more than 1300 are still publishing every day. The New York Times sells to more than 1 million print buyers, the Houston Chronicle delivers to more than 300,000 homes every Sunday. Thirty million Americans still spend their Sunday mornings with a century old ritual at the kitchen table, front porch, verandas of all sizes, coffee shops, libraries and studies. This is extremely heartening given the massive shift from an advertising reliant business model to a largely subscription-based industry.

The consumer demand is there even though most newspapers are a pretty lousy product, filled with too much content better done by digital media and not enough journalism. What if we actually started to produce a better product, filled with enterprising journalism, on better paper with clear value for the reader, as if every page offered insightful discovery, instead of 30-hour-old canned news sitting on the pages like stale bread.

It will never be 1998 again for American newspapers, nor will they ever see 1999 or 2000 again. They no longer can be all things to all people. That was a brief moment in history when monopoly newspapers were so dominant in their markets that they successfully stretched the product beyond its core mission. Newspapers will have to re-build themselves from scratch, page by page, going back to an era predating advertising — to the early Nineteenth Century when they were a high priced item for the literate and the influential and they co-existed with bloggers (pamphleteers). Only then will advertising return at scale, when marketers fully appreciate the influence of the readership.

Publishers need to examine whether, as an industry guaranteed by our Constitution, they will be satisfied with playing a singular role as a vanguard of freedom in their communities. To sustain that role, they will need to be ruthless about controlling the cost of anything that isn’t journalism. Citizens will continue to pay for protection from tyranny only if they believe newspapers are a true vanguard. As newspapers continue to shrink their journalism resources, the consequences for society — and indeed democracy itself — are great. Journalism is as important now as ever.

Lincoln Millstein is a former newspaper journalist and executive. He was recently awarded Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to write a book on newspapers.