Uncertainty as Tribune Prepares to Retrench
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
NYT
Is Sam Zell right about the newspaper business?
Last week, Mr. Zell, chairman and chief executive of the Tribune Company, and Randy Michaels, the chief operating officer, announced a set of deep cuts, saying that shrinking revenue left them no choice. They said they would trim 500 pages of news each week from the company’s dozen papers, including The Chicago Tribune and The Los Angeles Times. Their aim is a paper with pages — excluding classified advertising and special ad sections — split 50-50 between news content and ads.
Journalists may recoil, but is a thinner, flashier, more local newspaper, with a smaller newsroom staff, the best financial model for an industry that is enduring a painful contraction with no end in sight?
Conversations with analysts and executives yielded an impassioned argument on that subject — it is a question they have asked themselves many times — but no consensus. The one thing everyone seems to agree on is this: Newspapers around the United States have tried a lot of approaches, newsy to fluffy, parochial to international, voluminous to sparse — and all are in trouble.
Mr. Zell’s plan is an accelerated version of what many newspaper companies are already undertaking in the hope of staving off the kind of huge dislocation that occurred in other industries, like the steel business in the 1980s or the domestic automobile business today. In those cases, the pressure came from legacy costs, labor and foreign competition. In the newspaper business, which struggles with those costs as well, the biggest threat is the migration of advertisers and readers to the Internet.
(Continued here.)
NYT
Is Sam Zell right about the newspaper business?
Last week, Mr. Zell, chairman and chief executive of the Tribune Company, and Randy Michaels, the chief operating officer, announced a set of deep cuts, saying that shrinking revenue left them no choice. They said they would trim 500 pages of news each week from the company’s dozen papers, including The Chicago Tribune and The Los Angeles Times. Their aim is a paper with pages — excluding classified advertising and special ad sections — split 50-50 between news content and ads.
Journalists may recoil, but is a thinner, flashier, more local newspaper, with a smaller newsroom staff, the best financial model for an industry that is enduring a painful contraction with no end in sight?
Conversations with analysts and executives yielded an impassioned argument on that subject — it is a question they have asked themselves many times — but no consensus. The one thing everyone seems to agree on is this: Newspapers around the United States have tried a lot of approaches, newsy to fluffy, parochial to international, voluminous to sparse — and all are in trouble.
Mr. Zell’s plan is an accelerated version of what many newspaper companies are already undertaking in the hope of staving off the kind of huge dislocation that occurred in other industries, like the steel business in the 1980s or the domestic automobile business today. In those cases, the pressure came from legacy costs, labor and foreign competition. In the newspaper business, which struggles with those costs as well, the biggest threat is the migration of advertisers and readers to the Internet.
(Continued here.)
Powered by Blogger
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home