As you all may well know, 120 folks over at the San Francisco Chronicle accepted buyout offers last week.
I went and checked out Jim Lehrer's talk at the Commonwealth Club over the weekend. Of the demise of the American newspaper, Lehrer said, "Panic over newspapers is legitimate." He pointed out there has to be a real story before the "whiners, bloggers, and entertainment" step in. Lehrer added, "If the first information comes in a joke or shout, I think we have a problem."
So what's the solution?
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As one of those who took the Chronicle buy-out, I can readily agree that there's panic within and about American newspapers. I hear many people inside and outside our industry say the model is broken, but if that's true, why do many newspapers still have revenues that exceed expenses? If my memory's correct, the WSJ recently reported that the E.W. Scripps chain in financially sound. I'm told by a Contra Costa Times reporter that her paper makes money but is threatened because Singleton can't make the payments on the huge debt he took on to expand his holdings. My impression is that other large media companies -- the Tribune company and New York Times come to mind -- are suffering more from overly ambitious expansions and investments than from a broken model. Also, newspapers in Europe and Japan don't seem to be in the same state of crisis that we can see in the U.S. Why is that? I assume newspaper readers in Europe and Japan use the internet just as much as we do.
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