"By raising prices and lowering quality, a stagnant business can rely on its most loyal customers to continue to buy the product, allowing it to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze its customers as they croak. This slow liquidation of an asset’s value, destroying even its reputation in the process, kills the product. Wherever newspapers can be found reducing page size, cutting news pages, narrowing coverage area, reducing staff, shrinking circulation area, postponing the purchase of new equipment and raising subscription prices, they are harvesting market position."
My 90 year old father will get out in traffic and drive to get a USA Today, every day. He gets the Milwaukee Journal in a subscription deal that gives him full digital access, and has iPad and laptops galore, yet never reads a paper that is not in the physical form of...paper. My in-laws, of the same age, read their paper over and over again until the folds are creases about to wear through.
That is what’s left of the newspaper business - the dying audience that spent so long in their audience that they cannot leave. What is that, those presently 78+?
No amount of hand wringing, blame slinging, political hay making, bargaining, crying, screaming, begging, reorganization, name changing, or obfuscation will help at all when your business model is obsolete and no longer viable.
Goodbye papers.
Smith has a pair! What he’s done would be like investing in Mickey Mantle in 1967.
Colorado can always convert to rolling papers.
I never took the Denver Post seriously since around 1970 when they declared all pistols costing less than $45.00 (1970 dollars)to be SATURDAY NIGHT SPECIALS. The firearm shown was a Ruger Mk II semi auto.
Because Denver's not a national capital.
It's not quite a regional (multi-state) capital either.
So the audience and influence of a Denver paper is bound to be limited.
Newspapers are dying anyway, but a billionaire who wants influence in the country and the world might still be found to buy a New York or Washington DC paper.
That's a lot less likely to happen in other cities.
This slow liquidation of an asset’s value, destroying even its reputation in the process, kills the product. Wherever newspapers can be found reducing page size, cutting news pages, narrowing coverage area, reducing staff, shrinking circulation area, postponing the purchase of new equipment and raising subscription prices, they are harvesting market position.
Isn't the product dying anyway? Aren't newspapers, if they survive, likely to get smaller and thinner, whatever publishers do?
My wife loves getting the local paper, so we get it. They reduced the size of the paper (width) but it was fairly subtle. Then they stopped publishing a Saturday edition, changed their mind and now do a ‘Sunday’ paper on Saturday. Fewer pages, of course. At least it hasn’t gone liberal.
Thing is, 100 years ago, owning a newspaper typically made one rich. Now owning a newspaper is akin to owning a camera store.
I'm a grandfather and I won't buy any MSM crap at any price. Don't watch the news or listen to the radio. Journalists have slit their own entitled, narcissistic, manipulative throats.
Randall Smith is like that guy ruining Sears and Kmart.