Mutter's Manifesto

My old friend Alan Mutter, the Newsosaur, has been posting an intriguing series this week, running the numbers on the pros and cons of the notion that newspapers should switch, full on, from print to digital publishing. As Alan explains, this is hardly an either/or proposition; for most papers, the answer will be somewhere in between. Still, some papers aren't going to make it, and before the year is out, I suspect we'll see major American cities lose their print newspapers.

As I read the first three parts of Mutter's series, which basically argued that the online business can never replace print on anything close to a one-for-one basis, I worried that he was providing way too much aid and comfort to traditionalists who are clinging to print and have been too slow to adapt to the online world. I was concerned that by arguing that online-only publishing simply can't successfully replace print publishing as a business model, Alan was coming off a bit too pessimistic about the potential for online success, and too willing to suggest that the print model be preserved. 

I and others have argued repeatedly that newspapers have failed miserably to maximize the potential of their online businesses, in myriad ways. So arguing that print should survive because the online business can't bring in sufficient revenue to be a successful replacement is a red herring, because no newspaper company has devoted enough serious attention to trying. Ergo, the transition is fated to fall short. "Aha!" say the traditionalists, smugly, reading the first three parts of Alan's opus. "Told you so! That Web thing–it's not the answer!"

But the devastating fourth and final part of Mutter's series is a knockout punch for that sort of thinking. If the first three parts had the possible effect of leaving traditionalists smug about hanging onto print and poo-poo-ing online's chances to support successful ongoing businesses, Part Four argues that many newspapers have put themselves into a position to never be able to make the transition. They're simply too burdened with legacy costs, unimaginative thinking, and other problems to successfully shift from their traditional print model to something that looks a lot more digital. 

More importantly, Alan provides a generally superb point-by-point prescription that's an indictment of what newspapers largely haven't done–and desperately need to do–to succeed online. "The problem for publishers hoping for digital reincarnation is that most are seriously unprepared to be full-on interactive competitors," Mutter writes. 

A lot of those points have been raised on my blog (and others) over the past few months, but Alan does a great job encapsulating them: create cost-effective niche products, get much more sophisticated about Web advertising types, find ways to cost-effectively sell to smaller advertisers (including self-serve ad products that actually are easy to use), help advertisers understand digital advertising and marketing, become much smarter about search-engine optimization, aggressively aggregate content from other sources, build premium products that can earn subscription (or similar) revenue from targeted audiences, and truly use cutting-edge Web publishing tools to make their sites more interactive, relevant and useful (and to fully involve and engage the audience).

This is excellent advice, and unfortunately, it's exactly the sort of smart thinking that has mostly been paid lip service by the newspaper executives who probably were applauding the first parts of Mutter's series. As Alan says: "If newspapers have a prayer of getting where they need to go, their managers will have to abandon their stubborn attachment to print-centric thinking." That's an understatement.

Unfortunately, that seems unlikely to happen. Publishers have blown just about every chance they've had to get ahead of the digital tsunami that's washing over them. The harsh reality is–and always has been–that many papers aren't going to make the transition. The economy has fallen apart too quickly, killing whatever margin for error many companies had to figure out the best way to make an online-centric model work. That's why we're going to sadly see the demise of many papers starting over the next few months, unable to figure out a way to switch to a successful digital model in time.

In the end, those papers may simply have to fail to clear room for the next generation of news and information providers in those cities–entities that will probably be lightweight startups able to effective take advantage of what the Web has to offer and unencumbered by a lot of the legacy costs and thinking that are dooming their forebears. It's time to begin thinking about those replacements, and that future. Because it's almost here.

Comments

[jayrosen]

Instead of listening to you, and Alan, and Ken Doctor, people in the biz can now join The Newspaper Project

http://news.newspaperproject.org/

which proposes to fix the situation by balancing all the gloom-and-doom news with a more positive portrait of the American newspaper's predicament. Doesn't that put the crown on the whole sad story? There's something almost poetic about it.

[Mark Potts]

Thanks, Jay. I find that that ad campaign works so much better if you imagine it accompanied by an orchestra playing "Nearer My God To Thee."

[Tish Grier]

You're very right, Mark, that the problems are with the upper executive management--the C-level execs--in the news industry. In the past year, I've been to all sorts of conferences, where I've had the chance to talk to people in all levels of the newsroom. Many of them have solutions, or at least some really good ideas, of what to try to help their particular newspaper survive. Yet the C-levels fail to listen. Worse yet, they fail to imagine anything different, even when the folks in their newsroom can imagine--and even know--that things can be different. Maybe there needs to be a true revolution--like a coup--in newsrooms.