IP Democracy: Why Can't Newspapers Get With the Program?

In a radical step for a newspaper, radical even in these dire days for the newspaper business, the San Francisco Chronicle announced that it is slashing 25% of its newsroom staff. Boom. One-quarter of the staff will be gone by the end of summer.

I’ve been watching the developments that speak to nothing but doom for the newspaper business and I’m continually perplexed. Yes, yes, yes, newspapers were caught unawares by the classified ad thieves such as Craigslist. And, okay, the Internet is siphoning readers at an unanticipated rate.

But, in these days when Om Malik, Rafat Ali and Mike Arrington can whip up profitable web-based publishing empires seemingly overnight (not really overnight in the case of Om and Rafat), why can’t newspapers do the same thing? Or at least try to leverage the journalistic talent already on the payroll to forge new territories instead of letting that talent go?

Mark Evans cites one such innovative effort by the Toronto Star. The Star plans to intensify its coverage of something the web doesn’t cover very well, local news, has an aggressive online unit and is mounting new social networking features.

Content is king and newspapers have all the right stuff to create great content and build new businesses around that content. The Star is at least trying to exploit its resources. To be fair, most newspapers are scrambling around with web-based initiatives in a bid for survival.

But, to slash staff in order to minimize losses is a death spiral and everybody knows it. It’s only a matter of time before most newspapers follow the Chronicle’s lead. That’s too bad (but not necessarily sad, as Evans points out) and reflects nothing but a lack of vision and guts by newspaper editors and managers.

If somehow the newspaper industry just understood that even now the Internet is still the wild west, they’d take the journalists they’re jettisoning and instead use them to create new web-based businesses. In all likelihood, however, it’s too late for the newspaper business — sclerotic thinking and slow reaction to competition on the Internet is killing major dailies all over the place.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on May 20, 2007 3:10 PM to IP Democracy