Media

Protecting the Newspaper Industry’s Real Product

Last week Sam Zell announced that my beloved Tribune Company would be moving to a 50-50 editorial to advertising ratio, and many people decried this as another sign that the value of journalists and quality content is being further undermined. 

At a glance, it does seem like reducing the Los Angeles Times by 85 pages per week and continuing to hack through the esteemed paper’s staff is a significant blow, but the commentary surrounding this decision doesn’t underscore the exciting developments the company is making in online media, nor does it acknowledge that many of the inches in these axed stories are after-the-jump pontification that no one is reading anyway. 

Still, after all the boisterous things I’ve read about Zell, I had hoped that he would come up with a more creative solution than continuing to lay off reporters. I appreciate the need to eliminate costs, but eliminating reporters is like cutting off your arms or gouging out your eyes. They are the product. Having worked in both newspaper editorial and advertising sales, I always point out that it would be much more interesting to restructure sales incentives and commission structures in a model that rewards the transition from print to online. Whenever I sold an online ad (which was a better value for my customers!), I was cannibalizing my (substantially more lucrative) print revenue, which in turn made my goals impossible to achieve and meant I couldn’t get paid. And that’s all salespeople want. In my experience, the sales people are mercenaries while journalists are the bleeding product ambassadors. They are the ones who will stick through tough times when the others bail for jobs with pharmaceutical companies. If I were the leader of a newspaper organization I’d be much more inclined to retain and maximize the latter group. I’d also set more aggressive goals and diversify my online sales offerings, training my team to educate our best customers in the value of credible online content and pushing up web CPMs. When anyone can produce “journalism” these days, customers can still trust newspaper brands. 

This trust starts to erode, however, when reporters are overextended and recycling the same material. It’s great to consolidate resources under the same conglomerate from a business standpoint, but all research shows that consumers want local news. A Baltimore Sun reporter in the Tribune’s DC Bureau is not the person I want writing my political stories in Los Angeles. 

It’s further distressing if you consider that newspaper content drives all media stories. All those newspaper beat reporters grinding through their nitty-gritty niches are the ones producing original content and breaking news. Radio hosts and television producers devour it and parcel it down into their daily sound bites. For every journalist a news organization sends packing, the more we encourage group think. 

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