[quote=flu]Let me tell you a sad story of the state of the L.A. Times….
My parents use to subscribe to L.A. Times for about $80/month for 7 days. Then they started to realize they don’t really need the papers as much, so they ended up calling them and renegotiating to $40/month for 5 days…Then after about 3 weeks, they decided, they really don’t need the papers anymore since they get things from CNN.com, so they called and cancelled.
The L.A Times didn’t want to lose them as a customer (been a subscriber for 20+years). So while my parents continued to insist on cancelling, L.A. Times kept lowering the price…End result? 7 day subscription for….$1/month….
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So figure how much money your paper is going to lose doing this. The one-dimensional strategizing by these companies boggles the mind. I keep hearing the phrase, “Think outside the box”, but it is extremely rare that I see actual employment of the concept. I don’t know what they are teaching in B-schools today, but American business executives, for the most part, appear incapable of any sort of strategic analysis of their company operations. There certainly does not appear to be any proactive crisis management; I’m guessing that’s not possible when you won’t even admit the possibility that a crisis could arise at some point in the future. No, crisis management for most of the banks, the car manufacturers, the newspapers, and the insurance companies seems to be a corporate version of the little Dutch boy who plugged a leak in the Haarlem seawall with his finger, except that these incompetents expect the taxpayers to plug their leaks (and, courtesy of an obliging government, we do).
Rupert Murdoch addressed a conference of American publishers and editors in 2005: “Mr Murdoch, who recently held a summit with his newspaper bosses about forging a new internet strategy, said the industry had “sat by and watched” as circulations had fallen over the past 40 years, complacent because of its historic monopoly on the news business…..A rise in population had masked a relative decline in the TV age, he said, while in the 1990s profitability had held up in spite of circulations falling, further lulling the industry into a false sense of security.” In the article, Mr. Murdoch admits to his own resistance to change: “”Certainly, I didn’t do as much as I should have after all the excitement of the late 1990s. I suspect many of you in this room did the same, quietly hoping that this thing called the digital revolution would just limp away. Well it hasn’t… it won’t… and it’s a fast-developing reality we should grasp as a huge opportunity to improve our journalism and expand our reach.”
He goes on to make an extraordinarily perceptive observation: “[….consumers wanted] ‘control over the media, instead of being controlled by it’, pointing to the proliferation of website diaries known as “blogs” and message boards. And newspaper editors simply cannot afford to ignore this, he said, or to look down on readers or ignore what they actually wanted.”
This was 2005, and Murdoch was blaming himself for being behind the times. Four years have passed, and publishers and editors still aren’t getting the message. The sad result is that we have a populace that is choosing the news they wish to have, courtesy of obliging bloggers. Once a generation chooses and settles into a way of getting their information, they are unlikely to change unless forced to do so (as Zeitgeist pointed out).
The news organizations had a golden opportunity for success. Utilizing the Web would have cut their costs dramatically, increased their readership, allowed them much greater flexibility in gathering and reporting news, and eventually guaranteed them significantly higher advertising revenue. Instead, they chose to bury their heads in the sand and ignore reality. They’re now paying a high price for that ignorance, and the arrogance that fueled it.
