Edition:: UK |; Asia

Jobs

Interactive Designer
£28-£30
Associate Director - Digital
£55000-£65000
Junior Account Director
Up to £40k + benefits
Account Manager (Freelance or Perm)
Up to £28k + benefits
Business Systems Analyst
Up to £50k + Excellent Bens

Gordon's Republic

An industry in peril

Comments:1 Add your comment

The New York Times today has a story about an industry at risk, with cuts being made across the board and thousands of jobs under threat. You guessed it: it's the newspaper business. US newspapers are having a hard time and the paper reports that in the last few weeks alone The San Diego Union-Tribune cut more than 100 jobs (a 10th of its wor force); the Chicago Sun-Times began a major round of newsroom layoffs and put itself up for sale; while publishers in Minneapolis and Philadelphia have warned of tough times ahead.

Last year the San Francisco Chronicle, The Seattle Times, The San Jose Mercury News, USA Today and many others made similar reductions.

The New York Tomes Company itself revealed last week that it had cut its head count by 3.8% and the Mercury News has just 200 newsroom staff now, half as many as in 2000.

And it is one of those companies that have other non newspaper assets to fall back on with investors recently recommending it should invest more in digital assets.

This news comes in 2008 when the great and the good have said things are not so bad as we ride the quadrennial wave of the US Presidential elections and the Olympics, but it appears that while TV and the internet enjoys these spoils newspapers continue to suffer.

Next year is shaping up to be a bloodbath. These latest rounds of cuts follow the loss of another editor at the Los Angeles Times after James O'Shea walked after a dispute about newsroom budget cuts. He is the third editor to go since 2005.

The paper highlights a sobering fact as cash is invested into online operations, and many of these papers now have more readers online, but it is still not enough to balance finances.

But as the NY Times points out, for every dollar advertisers pay to reach a print reader, they pay about 5 cents, on average, to reach an internet reader and that is something newspapers need to change.

Part of that reason might lie in the fact that some critics accuse many US papers of having "done a poor job adapting to the internet" and the failing to be more creative with advertising.

Of course, this kind of talk about the demise of newspapers is not new. For instance, the Gannett Company's newspaper division, which owns USA Today and many local newspapers in the US and UK, had margins of 21% but suffered a 10% decline.

It seems to be getting much worse much quicker than expected and some papers will not make it. Last year, the march of classified advertising online speeded up.

We saw that here in the UK yesterday with the Daily Mail & General Trust. It reported classified advertising down 9% last year.

Brian Tierney, publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Philadelphia Daily News, told the NY Times: "I'm an optimist, but it is very hard to be positive about what's going on. The next few years are transitional, and I think some papers aren't going to make it."

Published Feb 07 2008, 04:36 PM by Gordon Macmillan

save it on Add to Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us Add to Digg

Digg

Stumble

share on

Facebook

Comments

by Mark Smith

February 15, 2008 11:17 AM

The best companies, the ones that care about the quality of the product and the wellbeing of the staff, realise that you can’t keep hacking away at a bone with no meat on it and decide to invest and treat people with a little respect. Sadly, in the media industry in the UK and abroad, there are plenty of businesses that are sliced down to the marrow and still going.

To comment on this post you have to be logged in

Top of Page

Search Community

About this blog