The Death of Print? No Way
it's more a question of finding -- and defining -- revenue in new ways
2009-03-05
By Eric Easter
Since the dawn of man, human beings have devised myriad ways to communicate with one another - paintings, spoken language, written language, books, flyers, newspapers, magazines, telegrams, radio, television, cable, and now the web.
They have one thing in common: They all still exist. None of them went away when the new thing came along. And a second, more important thing connects them: Somewhere, as you read this, some individual or some company is making an incredible amount of money doing each one.
That’s right, right now in America somebody just did a speech to a college for $15,000 an hour, somebody just bought a painting from Yves Saint Laurent’s lot for a ridiculous amount, Rod Blagojevich just signed a six-figure book deal, some club owner just printed 10,000 flyers for Ladies Nite and somebody just wired their bank account number via Western Union to Nigeria and is going to get a cut of a $40 million fortune for their
generosity.
So why all the hand wringing lately about the “death” of newspapers, magazines and everything else made from dead trees? A predictable and painful adjustment, indeed. But death? Really? There’s just no historical precedent to make that claim.
Newspapers have died since newspapers began. I don’t see anyone out buying a copy of The North Star or Freedman’s Journal at the corner store. Or the Baltimore News-American. Or LOOK magazine. All of those publications and many more died long before the internet came along.
The postal service and the paper industry have much more to do with dying media than the internet. There used to be a time when your subscription at least covered those costs. Now it costs more money to mail a subscription
than a magazine makes on that same subscription. If President Obama ever sought to bail out print media, he could just reduce bulk mailing rates to 1980’s prices and save most of the magazine industry in one fell swoop, at
least temporarily. But that won’t happen.
Reading habits change, tastes change, needs change and the time we have to read shrinks under the weight of our shifting, faster-paced culture, and all of those things work against books, magazines and newspapers. That’s the natural order of business, not a sign of death.
A lot of what you’re seeing in media today is just people finally doing the math that should have been done a while ago. It may sound like blasphemy, but there can be such a thing as “too much” money, and many media companies have suffered from this problem for decades.
We are seeing the failure of unrestrained management and outsized expectations. Many of these restructurings and reorganizations are the result of ill-conceived structures from the beginning. The hiring of mildly skilled people doing the job of one highly skilled person, as opposed to the reverse. Paying for executive assistants when you have Outlook and a Blackberry. Hiring 250 people to do one website. This was all inevitable.
Call me nuts, but if you ask me, there is still plenty of money to be made in print. The question facing publishers both new and old is “How much money is enough?”
Bigger public companies are held to a permanent expectation of growth by their shareholders. For them, $100 million in advertising when you’re used to $500 million is a sign of failure and a reason to get out of the business. But for a private company that’s only bringing in, say, $6 million in ad revenue today, $100 million is a goal to dream about and the makings of an amazing opportunity.
For every Rocky Mountain News fading into the dust, there is a Chicago Journal or Southport Shopper that serves three neighborhoods and does just enough business to make the owner a good enough living for him to live well and send his kids to college. For some entrepreneurs, that might be more than enough.
The big guys of course can’t roll like that. They can still make a tidy profit in print, but it will be much smaller than before and they will have to think of ways to grow more diverse, in and out of the content business. New York Times-branded premium vodka, anyone?
What newspapers and magazines will become – and in some ways already are – are finely niched products sold at a premium to those who prefer that medium. The glossy page is still a highly effective tool for many categories of advertisers, and nothing works for a local hardware store or grocery store like a coupon in a daily newspaper.
Newspapers and magazines won’t die, but companies that only do newspapers and magazines might.
Eric Easter is Chief of Digital Strategy for Johnson Publishing Company, Inc. He writers about politics, culture and technology for EbonyJet.com.
