Singleton's move prompted Romenesko reader Bradley Fikes to comment on that blog: "Singleton eviscerates his newsrooms, then boasts about the 'great local journalism' he'll charge for. . . . He is completely delusional."
Gannett and MediaNews Group are business partners in Detroit, where Denver-based MediaNews owns The Detroit News, and in partnerships including papers in Northern California, Texas and elsewhere.
Delusion Delite, under five minutes!
A quick-and-easy recipe for what we San Franciscans call a Colma Express.
1. Give away absolutely 100% for free, your good to quite-good news and information via the newly commercialized Internet.
2. Clasp face in horror as share price falls, and stock options grow worthless.3. Adjust, chop, cut, degrade, reduce, shrink, and otherwise weaken your principal product. Then, and only then, ask people to pay for it!
Serves: you right!
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[Image: Home Alone, 1990]
Everyone who ever thought that giving away content for free was a good idea should be fired. Newspapers didn't have to die. Nor did jobs have to be lost. Pure stupidity brought this company's papers down. The mistakes at the top are epic, and the errors in judgment continue even today, even at the biggest paper, USA Today. The blind are leading the blind. And the sad part of it is that journalism is being diluted and careers are being ruined. Everything that was built up at USA Today is being torn down in subtle and not so subtle ways. Meanwhile, the web sites continue to be weak income sources, despite all the money and resources pumped into them. The army of people needed to keep them running keeps growing with no timetable for when these sites are actually going to generate enough bucks to pay the bills. What a crazy strategy all around! There were many other alternatives to building the digital versions of the paper that would have accomplished two things: 1. Keeping the print products strong. 2. Bringing in more cash from the digital side. Jobs could have also been saved. But Gannett, like most other media companies, got caught up in the herd and marched right off the cliff. Many of the same people who were proponents of this madness are still here, still calling the shots. Amazing.
ReplyDeleteThis type of move is long overdue, especially given the local content that readers can find no where else except in newspapers.
ReplyDeleteAnd, it's really too bad Gannett didn't have this type of strategy in place as they forced us to place all of our content online for free soon after they acquired us. Our long-term plan was more in line with this and the WSJ.
No one is going to pay to view Gannett local sites. They need to charge for their national content to other Web sites such as Google and AOL. Paying for local content will destroy them.
ReplyDeleteClassic MediaNews BS. Just two years ago, they sent memos to every paper saying promote the free content on the web site more than anything else you do. They even set stupid rules like the number of stories and videos posted daily. What a joke. Now they realize they can't do it for free. Classic.
ReplyDeleteThe New York Times tried this a few years ago by putting all its columnists behind a pay wall. That splendid idea didn't work out too well.
ReplyDelete