The Newspaper Disease
Posted by Tim Gruber | Filed under journalism
Roger Black on The Newspaper Disease:
As with the federal government, it won’t help to keep doing more of the things that aren’t working. It won’t work to keep cheapening the product. To use Gordon Bethune’s line about a similar problem in the airline business: “You can take so much cheese off the pizza that nobody will eat it.”
Read the rest of the article here.
Further Reading:
Tags: journalism, newspapers, quotes, state of newspapers
2 Responses to “The Newspaper Disease”
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Kevin Wellenius Says:
May 14th, 2008 at 9:30 amThere is lots of discussion about cost-cutting measures hitting newsrooms and reducing the quality of the content in newspapers. The standard criticism is that this is short-sighted; that skimpier content will reinforce circulation and revenue slumps. But is there evidence of this? Are there papers we can point to and say ’see, the additional newsroom investment paid off in higher revenues’? Evidence that investing in newsroom quality pays off will do more to convince news owners than passionate arguments about the role of the free press in a democracy (however true they may be).
The question remains: will people reward newspapers for offering better content? If the answer turns out to be ‘no,’ then the downsizing and cost-cutting are not greedy, they’re rational.
-Kevin
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Tim Gruber Says:
May 16th, 2008 at 2:35 pmVery good points Kevin.
I guess time will tell?
