So I got interviewed today by a student reporter from The Maneater, about the Missourian‘s finances, our eMprint edition, Vox magazine and some other items. I’m not that used to being interviewed, but I will say that the student was well prepared and had good questions for me.
Much of the focus of the interview was the Missourian’s financial situation. It seems that the ‘Eater got an e-mail from someone saying that they needed to look into financial mismanagement at the Missourian, and that I was mentioned in it. Apparently the sender referenced my e-mail to Clyde Bentley that I later posted here. Good news is that I was mentioned as someone who knew what he was doing.
Anyhow, at the end of the interview, the Maneater reporter asked the standard “is there anything else you’d like to add?” That’s when I asked her what the impetus for the story was, and got her response about the news tip. I told her that, much as I’m proud of my work on Vox, it’s really due to Jen Rowe, Matt Hendrickson, et al., that the publication was as successful as it was — you can’t sell something that’s not a good read.
Her response was basically that she hadn’t seen any kind of mismanagement at the Missourian, and that our financial problems seem to mirror the wider newspaper industry and the economy. She asked if I’d ever seen mismanagement here, and I had to think about it for a minute. While I certainly don’t think we’ve managed things poorly (and I’m not dumb enough to say so on a public blog anyhow), it’s easy to say with the benefit of hindsight we could have done things differently.
But here’s the problem with hindsight: Looking back on the last 10 years or so, I see a lot of reasons for the Missourian to have made the choices it did.
For example, way back in 1999 we had this humble little site, which had only recently emerged from behind a pay wall. (Like plenty of other newspapers.) There are plenty of people now damning newspapers for making content free. But, seriously, this is a news product that couldn’t garner subscribers as a pay site — what option do you have? (The print edition has had its own subscriber troubles, but that’s another post.)
Or, for example, a lot of commentators say that newspapers should never have let Craigslist happen — or created it themselves. The problem is that whether you create it, or someone else does, the end result is free classifieds. (It’s ludicrous to think that newspapers could somehow band together and create a walled garden where they could charge whatever they wanted to — someone, somewhere, would break that model.) And people have figured out ways to compete with Craigslist — specifically, by finding ways to add value to classifieds.
Or, a lot of people say newspaper executives were blind to competition from other models. That’s bs, as anyone who remembers Videotex or audiotex services knows.
But if you were an editor in the late 1990s, when the Internet is still relatively unknown but your revenue source is still largely classified and display (print) ads, what would you have done? It’s easy now to say “invest in the Web,” but the late 1990s were littered with corpses of companies that had invested in the latest, greatest online thing, to no avail.
Recent Comments