ASPEN, COLORADO–I went to the Aspen Institute’s Media FOCAS panel on “The Future of Newspapers” here all but sure they were dead. Sure, I’m a third-generation newspaper guy, and I love the suckers, but I have dedicated most of the last 25 years or so to understanding their demise.
To whit: Post Time Media Inc., Aspen Post, Snowmass Post, Fractional Post, Skiing Post, et alia–my personal attempt to find a future in the info biz.
That was before I heard William Dean Singleton, the bossman of MediaNews Group, the fourth largest newspaper chain in these here United States. Wall Street has dumped newspapers in the crapper all right, and the Aspen Institute panel on the future featured The New York Times Co. chairman and chief executive officer Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Caroline Little, CEO and publisher of washingtonpost.com, executives at two companies that are moving forward with more alacrity if not complete acuity.
Singleton rekindled my hope for fish-wrapping when he explained The Deseret News in Salt Lake City, Utah, generates 75 percent of its revenues from “core” print activity; 13 percent from new print products; and 12 percent online. He said last year, this year, and next year will all be “down profit years” because his company is “transitioning,” but things will get better by 2009.
“They’ll catch each other,” he said of declining core print and increasing online and specialty print products.
In the meantime, at MediaNews online constitutes just 7 percent of revenue but 22 percent of profit. By the year 2011, Singleton predicted half of all MediaNews revenue will be generated online.
Furthermore, the Web has allowed both the Washington Post, in Loudon County, Virginia, and MediaNews–with 45 local zones in Denver–to produce hyper-local “boy scout” coverage that would never have made it into the paper otherwise. And the total audience , print and online, keeps growing.
“Our audience in our newspapers has never been as big,” Singleton told the assembled at the Doerr-Hosier Center. “It’s light years ahead…. This is not a dying business. This is a changing business…. We have to reduce the cost on the printed side…and invest on the digital side.”
Singleton said this is not great news for all newspapers.
“There are some newspapers in this country that won’t make it,” he said–but I couldn’t help but come away from the session with just a little jounce in my step, and the conviction that newspapers are indeed bigger than ever, and that paper has nothing to do with it any more. Sulzberger, a scion who has been battered by critics, said “the more important point is we can’t care” whether paper is the vehicle of delivery or not.
Beyond paper shredding, I think there are two other important points to be made here.
One: the newspaper business is not about “news” or “paper”–it’s about community.
Two: newspapers have great potential to unbundle their core product, to slice and dice their information in a zillion different (profitable) ways, both print and online.
Thank you, William Dean. You the man. I thank you, my father thanks you, and my grandfather thanks you. Some day my son might thank you, too.