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"But we like our newspaper."
"My newspaper and a cup of coffee? Heaven."
"But you're going to kill newspapers."
"I'll never give up my newspaper."
With folks of a certain age -- and very rudimentary research will reveal that Jane and I have reached that level of certainty these are among the reactions we hear to Main Street Connect.
Human nature cavils at being called a killer. We know gardens need weeding as well as planting, that destruction and creation are inseparable twins, but we prefer to be seen as life-givers not life-takers.
Main Street Connect will accelerate the decline of newspapers. So did the horseless carriage accelerate the decline of carriage-making. That was not Henry Ford's goal. He probably didn't worry much about carriage-makers. He was making something new. Somebody was going to make it (most valuable inventions are inevitable). He wanted to make his automobile as fast and as good as could. He worried that others would beat him to the finish line. He was a creator, not a killer. But his creation killed an industry.
Newspapers have been dying for six decades. Since the 1950's a smaller and smaller percentage of Americans have been reading a newspaper regularly. Initially, this was blamed on radio and television. Then on Americans' lack of time, as we got busier and busier, in our cars. Then on the computer. Finally, in the great financial meltdown of 2008, it was blamed on newspaper advertisers suddenly balking. All these factors, we were told, "destroyed" the newspaper business.
True enough, newspapers have been buffeted by bad news for awhile. But what, in general, was newspapers' response to all these hard knocks? To make themselves better, different, more satisfying to their readers? To ask their readers what they'd prefer? To experiment?
In the main, the response of newspaper publishers to their slipping fortunes was not to repair their product but to retain their fortunes. As more and more newspapers became owned by big chains, the criterion for success became financial performance, not audience satisfaction. The way a local publisher did well was by cutting costs and raising prices, not by investing in his product and making it better. He (or she) cut the paper size, made the print smaller, reduced the head-count and "did more with less" and, guess what, while the profitability of newspapers held up for a time, the product got worse. Publishers blamed the deterioration in the quality of their product on loss of advertising, but that was backwards. Advertising flows to an audience. If you lose your audience, you lose your advertising. Simple as that.
Newspapers permitted the destruction of their industry. But why? It seems so foolhardy. Partly, it's how business works in America. The first generation of a company's leadership might care more about making something good than about making money. Their focus is on quality, not the bottom line. Later generations take the product for granted of course, people will always want newspapers! They worry about their stockholders, their bonuses, their jobs.
This bottom-line preoccupation drove the newspaper industry to consolidate. Fewer and fewer publishers owned more and more titles. With their superior management skills, national publishers tended to derive heftier profits from the newspapers they had acquired. Their shareholders were happy. The managers received bonuses. But insensibly, trim by trim, efficiency by efficiency, the newspapers grew less necessary to their readers. The publisher did not bust his editorial budget to cover a major local news event because he did not want to miss his numbers and hey, did it really matter that much? The enjoyable but expensive promotion that the previous publisher (a local owner) had splurged on was scrapped as too expensive.
The decline of newspapers was gradual because most newspapers had little viable local competition. Who would risk introducing into Louisville a competitor to the Courier-Journal. Local business leaders would collude to be sure that the upstart got starved. (This story replayed itself in market after market.) Cost of entry, in business jargon, was prohibitive.
So newspapers remained profitable for decades, despite their worsening symptoms. Advertisers "stuck with them" notwithstanding circulation declines and the evident cheapening of the product. Advertisers "stuck" not out of loyalty "loyalty" in an advertiser is a sign of idiocy; they stuck because they had no place better to go. They got less and less for more and more, but they still had to sell their products or services, so what choice did they have?
The advent of online was the newspaper industry's great chance to save itself. Newspapers were the nation's newsgatherers, they had the relationships with their advertisers. Why didn't they move their business news dissemination onto the obvious medium of the future?
For 10 years, as huge new companies were born online think Amazon, Mapquest, Travelocity, online banking, Zappo's, Yahoo, AOL, Monster, Craig's List, Google the big profitable newspaper industry threw up their hands in bewilderment and disbelief. "It will never happen," they asserted. "You can't make money online. You can't afford the quality. It will be a rush to the bottom." Persuaded by their excuses, most newspapers did nothing. When the economic meltdown of 2008 occurred, many cut their online investments. They said they could not afford them.
Main Street Connect was born out of incredulity. How could the newspaper industry the industry in which I spent most of my adult life allow this to happen? People need news. If you give folks good news, they will visit. If they visit, local businesses will follow them, because these are their customers. Giving a community good news is pretty easy. You report what's going on and present it attractively. Online looks much handsomer than newspapers because the reproduction is so splendid. Online is also much cheaper to produce, once you construct your news engine. No paper, printing, postage, delivery, subscription solicitation, etc.
It's too soon to say if Main Street Connect has created the viable vital community news medium for the future. We've only been around for a few months. It is not too soon to report that neighbors in our initial eight towns are visiting us in droves and coming back and back many as often as five times a week. They want to know what's going on with their neighbors. They want to see who won the lacrosse game or who's selling a house or what's playing this weekend or to learn about Aunt Betty's amazing lasagna (they know Aunt Betty). They want to feel good about the community they call home. And why not? Checking into Main Street Connect is free they can get a lot of news and information in under five minutes and they don't have to bundle their newspapers at the end of the month and lug them to the recycling center.
So, yes, inevitably, Main Street Connect and any imitators who follow us will hasten the decline of newspapers. And, no, in a few years, you're unlikely to have a newspaper to read with your morning coffee. But is this sad? Is it even regrettable? Death is not the happy side of life, but without death you could never have life. To my friends of a certain age I now say, "Get over it. You can mourn the past or celebrate the future. Is that really a choice?"
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