We continue our conversation with Phil Meyer, professor of journalism at UNC and author of "The Vanishing Newspaper."
How important is the profit margin to newspaper's survival? A lot of people say if we could live with with say, 10 percent profit margins, there would be no problem.
MEYER: I wish that that were true. But I don’t know where the bottom’s going to be. Margins are going to fall. In the book I say newspapers are most like grocery stores. Food and news spoil quickly. Grocery stores make a lot of money on a 2 to 3 percent margin. Newspapers ought to be more like grocery store margins, and in theory it should be possible to do quite well. The reason they don’t, of course, is that all their investment decisions have been based on a 20 to 40 percent margin.
[McClatchy President Gary] Pruitt’s strategy has been to buy papers in growing marekts.
MEYER: That’s a good start.
But we’re still clinging to the hard paper circulation model. And by that model we’re failing.
MEYER: That’s right. And failure is inevitable because of another trend. And that is the newspaper industry has failed to interest young people in news. No matter how good you make the paper, you’re not going to get young people without a really focused effort to do that. And they gravitate more easily to new media, so the only way you’re going to reach them is through new media, I think.
What can regional metros like the News & Observer learn from the success of niche publications?
MEYER: The way [Harvard professor] Clayton Christensen puts it is newspaper need to find jobs that consumers need done and then they need to invent a product that will get that job done. One example that stick in my mind is two photographs. One shows a guy riding the subway and snoozing because he doesn’t have anything to do. The other shows the same guy reading a free newspaper that he found at a transit stop. Well, filling that time usefully is a job that he needed to have done, and newspapers in some cities have created special products to do that job.
At every corner you’ve got 50Plus, Carolina Woman Carolina Parent ...
MEYER: And they’re doing all right because [to sell] niche products you need to advertise in a niche product.
That turns newspapers on their heads. Because newspapers have always been a mass market medium, and some people say that’s going to save them: that they remain the only way to reach large numbers of people
MEYER: When you have goods and services sold to large numbers of people, when you had large downtown department stores who were the main advertisers in newspapers [that made sense]. But those department stores are gone, They’ve been replaced by boutiques in the suburbs that sell specialized products.
So we should give up on the mass market model?
MEYER: Probably because the main mass marketer now is Wal-Mart. And they’re so well know they don’t need to advertise.
What’s at stake for the reader if the News & Observer can’t find a way to do its thing?
MEYER: There will always be somebody to supply the reader the information that he or she needs. It might be something like the Raleigh Chrionicle, which is growing right in front of your nose. You guys should have come up with a product like that before they did. And the key to the success of a product like that is going to be content. Content is still king. You need to stop worrying about the cost of newsprint and figure out a way to get that content up cheaply. People who use the Internet are the people who are going to rule world and buy products, so you’ve got to reach them.
What keeps you passionate about this stuff? Why do you care?
MEYER: Because I have grandchildren, and we can’t have democracy without newspapers. Thomas Jefferson was right. If newspapers fail, our sense of community is going to fail, and if our sense of community fails, our democracy will fail. And there are already signs that it’s happening. So we’ve got invent something to replace newspapers to achieve that sense of community. Worst case, we’ll be ripe picking for anti-democratic movements. If we can’t keep something like newspapers keeping the public informed then we’re in big trouble.
