Suffering from Cuts: Invest and Try Dose of Public Journalism
John Robinson, editor of the Greensboro News & Record, blogs about the 41 layoffs at his newspaper, including 11 full-timers and seven part-timers in the news room.
One of his remedies to help right his newspaper in the future sounds a lot like Public Journalism:
Community building — In addition to technology and journalism, our experience with One Guilford, the leadership symposium we sponsored, proved that there’s a role for the newspapers to build community. As we continue our emphasis on local, community-level news, we plan to organize and host other community forum to pull people together for positive change.
Ed Cone takes a look Landmark Communications, the paper’s Norfolk, Virginia based parent company, and writes:
It appears that Landmark has chosen to chase its historic profit margins rather than investing in its Greensboro business for sustained product quality and long-term growth. That would seem to be a business decision made in Norfolk, and executed by Robin Saul according to Landmark strategy.
I think it’s a poor choice, and not just because I am pro-Greensboro and pro-quality journalism. As I wrote in late 2005 in the column linked above, “[I]f papers keep responding by cutting their newsroom staffs in an attempt to preserve profit margins from another era, it will be grim. What they need to do instead is invest in improving their product, online and off.”
A similar argument is made here: “Twenty years of research have taught me that good journalism is good business, at least in the long run, and that a company can produce good journalism while still producing profit margins much higher than 10%. Perhaps the real myth is that public companies will continue to make 20% to 25% profit margins 25 years from now. But the current managers won’t be running the companies in 25 years, which might affect which myths they cling to and which they dismiss.”
…it underinvested in new media and product quality as the market began to change. Yes, it has been smart and forward-looking with blogs, and it made early attempts at becoming an online platform, but I haven’t seen the kind of game-changing investments that show long-term emphasis and a deep understanding of the ways the business will continue to be transformed. Where’s the meaningful local answer to Google and Craigslist? Where’s the local online ad market, and the new-media counterattack on TV and radio?
Cone points out that according to Forbes Landmark had 2005 revenues of $1.72 billion, and then building off that fact argues:
If the N&R earns at the very low end of industry averages … and that $62 million revenue figure is close to accurate, Greensboro is sending somewhere north of $6 million a year to Norfolk. It would make no huge difference in Landmark’s overall numbers to cut profit margins for a while to merely solid rates of return, and to reinvest a few million bucks per year in product and product development, but it would make a huge difference to the News & Record, and Greensboro, and the future of local journalism.
