How long can you succeed while fighting the wrong battles ?
On Tues March 17, 2009, one more big print newspaper goes down the drain. The Seattle Post Intelligencer Printed its last paper but has decided to go strictly Online Web News ONLY.
Not a big deal right, if you read this, you may not be a vivid paper reader. For those that are, it is getting to be the mark of the end of print media. Now for the current paper in question, they are cutting staff and dropping investigative reporters and keeping all the editorial staff, Now what does that tell you about what kind of journalism you are going to have. I doubt many will really like it in the end.
How did this come to be?
It is a long history of all media to maintain their own existence and force their way of doing things in a world that had other ideas that they were not interested in considering as the Internet world was expanding rapidly with new models of what folks want/need/enjoy and no longer would have them imposed on them as there are now choices and they have been asleep at the wheel.
Lets look at some flimsy arguments and stupid decisions the media in general have made in the last 12 years.
Newspapers said they could not make a profit and lobbied the FCC to allow them to buy more newspapers and they got what they wanted. They spent their money and marketing time on making a bigger paper or controlling more area and made additional profits with “redundancy elimination” (that would be the term for job cuts commercially correct) common in all mergers and acquisitions.
Radio and TV stations made the same argument with the same result.
Newspapers cried once again in 2008 as they could still not make enough money and wanted to be able to buy Radio Stations. FCC grants wish once again.
Gee, if I was in a market whos whole industry was loosing money, I think I would spend my time, marketing and money in a new market that was making money or re-invent the one I was in.
Now what do you have, the same entities can’t make any money and they are so large now it is ridiculous how much control they have over market areas and content. And for the consumer, it has diminished to the point they are not selling what anyone wants to buy. AM radio fell to FM radio. Of course AM is still there but what quality programming is there. Just a bunch of Aural Blogs that seem to have power and political intent. Oh, they do report news but just reporting news is not a big deal, many do that. Where is the investigative journalism? It dies with each passing merger and media failure.
Take this case in point:
Not so long ago, you could enjoy decent programming on TV over the air broadcasts. For those that are not sure what that means now-a-days, that would be TV programming you could watch with just an antenna connected to your Television. What happened to all the programming?
Cable companies started to buy all the movie companies. When they owned them all, you could not watch a movie on broadcast TV. You now needed Cable TV or Satellite TV. Now when you watch these same “I Love Lucy”,”Leave it to Beaver”, “Mash”, Bugs Bunny” re-runs you not only have to pay for the service that brings it to you, you still have to watch even more commercials that you did for Broadcast TV.
Now how can the Broadcast stations make any money without content. Thank you Congressmen for they great work they have done in making less competition so it costs more and gives you less. Now I am waiting for all those new Digital TV stations to show something. What can they show, there is no content for them except very old C & D Movies that most are not as good as the garage videos one can watch on YouTube.Com or other great programming throughout the web and on demand.
So we now have 3 times as many Broadcast TV channels so we can watch those infomercials in vivid Digital High Definition. How long will they be able to profit from that?
The Big MOOT Point here is if you provide meaningful content, you will have an audience.
Now they all have been monopolizing on each other and the world has been changing around them and they paid little notice. Their monopolizing ways do not work on the Internet because there are choices.
A great opportunity is opening for others to now fill the gap in new business models and the voids will fill in.
I don’t really want to hear them cry not one more time to the FCC and/or lobby Congress.
They will sound like the banks wanting Congress/FCC to fix something that will allow them to control more when it is their business model that is broken.
I just refuse to feel sorry for them at this point as they have had plenty of time and warning to do something for themselves and keep choosing incorrectly. “Are They Stupid Or Something?”
Now again for the current paper in question, Why would you not want to do investigative journalism. Without that you can never be more than 2/3 of your competitor in your market area. You will never be unique !
A chance to have a monopoly on some content would win the day for them.
That is how it worked when print & radio media were the only media, and it still works.
The drive for continual higher profits year over year at their own expense is making them MOOT media !