Michael Wolff, author of the excellent Burn Rate, writes:
Throughout the Tribune world—the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Hartford Courant, among others—everybody knows life as it’s been has ended. . . . You have to understand that this is the most momentous, and transformative, time in the news business—as significant as this moment is to the automotive and financial industries. There will be, practically speaking, no newspaper industry after this is done. A nobody-gets-out of-here-alive sort of thing.
A friend of mine who works for one of these newspapers said that the end has been coming for a long time. In the early 1990s, if I remember correctly, the audience started to shrink. At the time, and for a long time thereafter, this was ignored. Had the problem been recognized back then it might have been possible, given a lot of time to experiment, to find a solution, a way to survive much longer. But now it is too late.
why the heck do we tend not to act on these things? i don’t mean to judge finance and newspaper people. i tend to be a fan of capitalism and tend to think that the market is the best you’re going to get in judgments, but it’s weird to think people are looking at numbers and saying, ‘wow, the numbers aren’t good, but let’s just ignore them and see what happens,’ then things fall apart. maybe people have a habit of procrastinating, in the hopes some answer will emerge, and maybe this is a decent strategy often, since it seems like it comes so naturally.
It was much much easier to ignore them than to do something. To do something that might have been useful would have involved starting whole new projects. Getting people to work on those projects — of questionable career relevance — would have been incredibly hard given their apparently flimsy motivation.