The venerable Columbia Journalism Review has a devastating critique of the Dallas Morning News and its downsizing/turnaround strategy. It's a case study of a destructive industry trend, not just a gossip piece.
Two outside observers are not optimistic.
Philip Meyer has been a reporter, editor, corporate officeholder, and pioneer in computer-assisted reporting, and is one of the country’s most respected journalism scholars. Meyer understands why managers at The Dallas Morning News eliminated two hundred newsroom jobs. He only wishes they would look at the long-term implications.“It seems to me that papers that do what Dallas just did have decided to liquidate the business and get as much money out of it as they can,” says Meyer, who holds the Knight Chair in Journalism at the University of North Carolina. “That’s not crazy. It’s a rational strategy if you only care about what happens on your watch as a manager because it takes a long time for a newspaper to die, and, while it’s in its death throes, it can still be a pretty good cash cow. But it’s really bad for the community and for the business in the long run.”
Meyer and other researchers have published more than a dozen studies over the past ten years exploring newsroom staffing, journalistic quality, and profitability. A recent study by Esther Thorson, an associate dean at the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism, examined four years of financial data from hundreds of newspapers. Thorson, who has studied media for twenty years, says those who try to cut the newsroom to maintain profitability are doomed to failure. “That’s not a business model,” she says. “That’s a death model.” Thorson found that larger newsroom investments would translate into greater profits. “A newspaper is a rich environment of information and entertainment,” she said. “That makes it a fabulous locale for advertising. But if your product is degraded and circulation plummets, why would advertisers want to invest in that?”
Perhaps CJR could conduct the same kind of analysis of our local Houston Chronicle. Like Dallas, there's no real competition in journalism here and the implications for citizens are severe.
Posted by Alan at July 8, 2007 03:33 PM