Bill Virgin, Seattle PI columnist nails it: Class final: How to kill an American newspaper

I have nothing to add to this except thanks to Bill for his efforts... and the sincere hope that those running the Columbian both read... and heed, the sentiments within:

Last updated March 16, 2009 5:57 p.m. PT

Class final: How to kill an American newspaper

By BILL VIRGIN
P-I COLUMNIST

Here in our twice-weekly seminars, you the readers have helped analyze and dissect the leading business and economic issues, trends and controversies of the day -- global competition and outsourcing, Boeing and Airbus, Microsoft and the rest of the software/online world, Starbucks and McDonald's, government taxation and spending, good ads and bad ads, paper or plastic.

For our final session together, and our final case study, it is time to turn our attention inward, to consider the forces, external and internal, that have made this the last day of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Our topic for today: How to kill an American newspaper.

One crucial point to remember right at the start is that what is happening now is hardly new or unique to this industry. Papers have been dying for decades. Gone from the ranks are such names as the New York World Journal Tribune (itself a last-gasp attempt to rescue multiple papers including the venerable Herald Tribune), the Dallas Times Herald, the Washington Star, the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, the Pittsburgh Press, the Chicago Daily News ...

They, and dozens more lesser-known names, were done in by inexorable trends such as the move of families to the suburbs, the rise of television news as a competitor to the evening paper and labor strife, all of which contributed to the winnowing of many cities from three dailies to two, and from two to one. Seattle is comparatively late to the game as a big city dropping to a single general-interest daily newspaper.

Now, the prevailing worry has it, many big cities (Seattle included) are about to take the next step, from one daily newspaper to none at all.

It has become fashionable to attribute this industry's woes entirely to external forces including: the Internet and its components draining away advertisers and readers; those darn kids who won't pay for information and won't sit still for information that takes longer than five seconds to consume; and most recently a recession that has clobbered what few advertisers the industry still has.

To put all the blame, or even the bulk of it, on those factors is not only too convenient, but also downright deceptive. It obscures a long-standing truth about this business: American newspapers have been and continue to be, as a sector, the worst-run of any industry in this country.

The Internet may have helped weaken the precipice upon which the newspaper industry was standing, and the recession may have given it a helpful stomp to send us into the chasm. But it was the industry itself that walked out onto a ledge of crumbling shale and stood waiting for it to collapse.

If American newspapers want to look for the underlying source of their troubles, a mirror would be a good place to start -- and finish -- the search.

What sorts of mistakes did the industry make? Its reaction to the Internet is a mother lode. Instead of using the Internet as a complement to its print product, the industry went chasing after the Web and offering its most valuable property -- the news it so carefully and expensively gathered -- for free, while chasing the chimera that online advertising would support the whole thing.

The trend was no service to either readers or advertisers -- people read far more in print, and see more ads, than in an online version. The bandwidth for delivering material may be nearly infinite online, but readers' ability to absorb it isn't, and it gets even narrower online.

In the process, what newspapers did was devalue their brands and the heritage and legacies built into them, their core products and the value proposition that brought them readers and advertisers in the first place.

The genius of the American newspaper was never that it was the only place you could get information. Given enough time, money and energy, even in the age of the telegraph you could assemble the same information

But the essential point was that you didn't have to. The newspaper went to that trouble for you and delivered what it collected in a portable, affordable, easily digested form. That readers didn't consume it all didn't matter; by providing enough elements of interest to enough people (sports scores, local news, the crossword and Sudoku, the weather map and TV listings, letters to the editor, the comics, maybe even a business column or two), the daily newspaper aggregated enough readers to be attractive to advertisers seeking a mass audience.

Or at least newspapers did until they began lopping away content and features readers had come to expect. The rationale the industry used was that readers could and would get that information elsewhere, especially online, so why waste valuable print real estate on them? But the message readers got from the newspapers was they ought to go elsewhere for TV listings, stock quotes and the like. Surprisingly enough, readers took the advice and did.

Those were hardly the only blunders made by the industry. The strategy of going after younger readers with pandering and condescending content managed to both drive away older, loyal readers, while also alienating younger demographics who understandably weren't buying what papers were selling. Newspapers treated conservatives with a mixture of revulsion, contempt, indifference and puzzlement, and there went another potentially loyal segment of the reading audience.

Those mistakes were compounded at the local level by missteps made by this newspaper. The emphasis on a Seattlecentric view of the world accomplished the task of bifurcating the market into two and then focusing on the smaller, slower-growing portion. The strategy also rendered the paper irrelevant to those who lived on

this side of the lake but worked on the other, and vice versa.

The P-I also found itself bound in a business relationship with a partner that clearly did not want it around and whose management of the arrangement was, to be charitable, desultory.

Squandered opportunities and botched advantages are not a new phenomenon for American newspapers. Over the years they have created openings for alternative and local-music weeklies, independent business weeklies and city lifestyle magazines. Would those have emerged had newspapers been more diligent about spotting potentially lucrative markets and getting to them before new entrants did? Probably. Did daily newspapers make it far more likely that those startups would thrive? Absolutely.

Despite that bungling, daily newspapers managed to survive for decades, with a few papers lost along the way, on the strength of a franchise so valued by the public that even the industry couldn't screw it up.

Until now. In business there is a phenomenon known as the death spiral, in which the measures intended to rescue a company or industry not only fail to stem the losses, they actually accelerate the decline. In the case of newspapers, the loss of readers and advertisers led to cuts in content and features and greater irrelevancy, which led to more lost readers and advertisers, which led to still more cuts, which led to ...

Which leads to the present, potentially fatal predicament for newspapers, or at least the one you're reading now.

What is the lesson for the rest of the business world?

No business or industry is exempt from challenges and competitive threats (what business hasn't been upended by the Internet, or the economy, or both?). None is promised, much less guaranteed, perpetual survival. What matters is not the nature or severity of those challenges, but how well prepared the company or industry is to evade, counter or adapt to those threats. Newspapers weren't; now they're facing the consequences.

It's a lesson too late learned to help us, but just maybe, dear readers, it might help you.

Class dismissed.