Want to Save Newspapers? Staff the newsrooms.
Want to Save Newspapers? Staff the newsrooms.
Submitted by kpaul.mallasch on Thu, 12/21/2006 - 7:00pm.Howard Owens has some other thoughts after he blogged earlier today about what he describes as 'whining' by Gannett (and other big media) photographers about the whole do more with less philosophy that's running rampant in the glass towers. He has a great write-up on his thoughts about communication, but I think he's totally missing the point - shuffling titles and piling more work onto already overworked journalists is NOT the solution. If big media news operations want to grow and flourish, they have one simple thing to do: start staffing their newsrooms.
Sure, their profits (short term) would go down, but you can't seriously tell me 10% profit margin isn't enough. I mean, we're talking about something that is vital to the American way of life - a free press. There's nothing wrong with profit. I've never said that. But all these stop-gap measures by Gannett and others IS NOT going to 'save' their empire.
I'm sure they know the answer already (hire more staff) because they're smart people. However, I think they're grasping for short term revenue, clinging to that over 20% profit margin instead of investing in the future.
This is why they're in peril - not because some photogs are complaining they'll have more work to do on top of their already full plates.
Anyone else have any thoughts?
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The sad part is . . .
double-digit profit margins are artificial numbers that don't accurately reflect the financial health of every newspaper. Just like with any other investment, the cash flow is more important than the profit margin. Wal-Mart gets by very well on a profit margin that hovers around 2 percent, because it does business in a very different way from newspapers.
Which is a roundabout way of saying that only the financially uninitiated take a newspaper's profit margin all that seriously. I mean, if your cash flow is at the volume of Wal-Mart (in the billions), 2 percent is OK. When your cash flow is in the thousands (most newspapers), a 10 percent margin may not be.
So, newspapers are caught in the devil's bargain.
If you ask me -- even if you don't -- I think it's because they insist on defining their business too narrowly.
And that's a whole other discussion.