Do you have any doubt that the viability of traditional newspapers is at risk?  Every newspaper in America is printing fewer pages today than a year ago (and most fewer than 2 years ago).  Young people (meaning under 35 – if that’s really young) never got hooked on newspapers, and older readers are abandoning subscriptions, causing advertisers to abandon newspaper advertising – leaving the newspapers with big revenue shortfalls.  As ad spending on the internet keeps growing at 100%/year, and Google explodes with revenue and higher valuations as a result, is there any doubt that the typical morning newspaper will have to undergo fundamental restructuring?

Readers of this blog probably don’t have much doubt.  But read this quote from the CEO of a major Chicago newspaper – the Sun Times Media Group.  "The fallout of this forced downsizing of the nation’s newsrooms is not being replaced elsewhere in our society, nor is it likely to be.  Hence, with our most important asset, the newsroom, we will continue to have little competition.  When the economy rebounds 12 to 18 months from now, as we believe it will, the newspapers will not only survive but somehow and in some form thrive again." (Read quote in Chicago Tribune article here.)

Give me a break.  Talk about putting your head in the sand.  Mr. Freidham is really saying "Hey, I’m Locked-in to what I’ve always done and I don’t want to change.  Just give me some time, and probably more money, and I’m sure somehow my old Success Formula will make money again.  Trust me."  Effectively, he’s saying investors should ignore all market information and simply hope, literally, that somehow they will again make money. 

That’s probably what the CEOs of Montgomery Wards, Polaroid, Fannie Mae, Brach’s Candy and Wicke’s Furniture were saying a few months before Chapter 11 wiped away their company existence. 

Meanwhile, the Huffington Post is opening an office in Chicago.  Now, traditionalists might not care about this.  But truthfully Ms. Huffington and a few of her 40-odd employees represent a new kind of competitor that is far less expensive, and makes a pretty good, competitive product.  Rather than newspaper journalists from the New York Times or Washington Post, who told us about Vietnam 40 years ago, we have Ms. Huffington and her cadre on television almost nightly.  Especially when it comes to politics, they are considered closer to the news sources than many leading newspapers, and their reporting is considerably more timely. If you want to know John McCain or Barack Obama’s next move on a vice presidential selection keep your browser on Huffington Post rather than waiting for what the Sun Times will print tomorrow.  The Huffington Post may not yet be the L.A. Times, but at a fraction of the cost they are rapidly making improvement, growing readership and advertisers, and making money in the process.

All the major newspapers could have opened web sites and become the Huffington Post.  Marketwatch.com, had no advantage over the Wall Street Journal.  But the newspaper leaders didn’t try to embrace the web and find a new Success Formula.  Instead of opening web bureaus and giving them lots of cash to figure out how to be the next CNNMoney.com they under-invested in the web environment.  They tried to make the web sites just some sort of mirror of the newspaper – without knowing how to get ad revenues for the effort.  And to this day, the major newspapers are still not internally Disrupting and opening White Space to redefine themselves on the web.  Successful web sites are not anything like newspapers – yet they distribute news rather effectively.

I like to read a newspaper.  But I don’t read every word.  I like the paper because I can scan it.  If I like the headline, I grab a few words.  If I like the article, I go online and find the article to read later digitally.  So why don’t newspapers just print the headlines, an article abstract and on-line addresses?  That’s just one idea out of probably a hundred to change how newspapers operate.  Why don’t they try them?  Because they don’t know how to make the on-line business profitable!  No major newspaper today sells on-line ads at the same time as print ads – and they don’t know how to sell on-line advertising effectively.  The publishers never Disrupted their operations, realized there is real risk in avoiding change, nor created White Space in which to learn.  Now the market shift to on-line is so far advanced they are without the resources and time to learn. 

Newspapers need to take action, and fast.  Misplaced optimism about the future is simply dreaming – yearning for the past to return.  There are things newspapers do well, and digging up stories is one of them.  But in a declining print readership market, they’ll lose that capability if they don’t quickly learn how to profitably monetize it.  With the Sun Times near bankruptcy due to years of mismanagement and fraud, and now Tribune Corporation sailing toward the brink due to its incredible debt load, it’s possible Chicago readers and advertisers could be without an effective local news source in just a few years! It would behoove these companies to realize the newspaper of old will never return, and pour their resources into discovering a new way to compete – Pronto!  Or we won’t have anybody left doing the hard work of journalism and it will be the consumers of news that suffer most.