We all experience déjà vu now and again; occasionally it even makes me say WTF.
Back in December 2005 my pressroom supervisor at that time told me “Ed, the pressroom is a drag on the company! We produce no income for the newspaper, only cost the company money”. I thought this was a rather odd statement, and if he really believed this he should either work for free or quit. Well he left the company the next month when the Times Chatsworth Facility was closed, I take it he believed the pressroom was a drag on the company.
Just a few weeks ago a manager at the Los Angeles Times told me the same words I had heard from my former supervisor nineteen months ago, and the two men have never met one another. My former supervisor left before my current manager arrived from Chicago, so I’m left wondering how these two men came up with this same type of thought?
Could they have read the same book or training manual on pressrooms bringing major newspapers down through costs of producing a daily paper, or did they attend a class meant to scare them straight. If history repeats itself, the last person sharing this belief with me, will be leaving the Times shortly, and saving the company his salary, and no longer a drag on company profits.
If pressrooms are such a drag on company profits at newspapers, why not shutter all the printing presses that produce newspapers, fire the employees, and make all profits from the Internet? Publishers don’t shut down their pressrooms because eighty to ninety percent of their profits come from the hard copy of their product. But, the gap between Internet profits and hard copy profits are narrowing everyday, with estimates of two to six years before the Internet matches or exceeds the revenue brought in by producing a real newspaper.
As a blogger I enjoy keeping track of my audience, if I were to choose to use the numbers my Internet Service Provider supplies I would be reporting numbers of over four and a half million hits since the inception of this blog on January 1st, 2006. Since I sell no products or services, I opt to use a counting system that only counts actual users, so I’m proud to say we have had 95,826 hits from March 31st, 2006 to date.
Can we believe the numbers reported by major newspapers regarding online visitors, maybe is all I can say, but I know the number of online users is growing everyday by leaps and bounds.
It will not be long before an entire daily newspaper will be downloaded onto your hard drive, which Newspaper and Technology magazine is offering for free today, putting us all out of work in the pressroom.
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1 comment:
Their right.....
Production has always been a "cost center" not a "revenue center".
This is the way it has been from the first day a newspaper was published. The concept is not “brain surgery” if advertising can’t generate enough “revenue” to pay for the “cost center(s)” the business must start eliminating “cost centers” or the business will go bankrupt. I think your supervisor and manager understand how business works, as they rightly should. It’s pretty much common sense and when employees place demands on employers without understanding this concept it eventually will cause loss of jobs. And that is what we are seeing today, throughout the whole industry!
In other words.... “You can’t take it out if you don’t put it in!” So make sure you know what is in the “pot” before you demand to take something out, because if you don’t, it could cost you what you all ready have!
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