A Day of Contrasts

Wednesday morning was just plain weird and probably something worthy of documenting.

I am just not sure exactly what it all means.

On Wednesday, I was in my newsroom "double-wide" cubicle attempting to maintain attention on the work at hand: Revamping the daily news budgets for the big press launch/redesign next week.

My cubicle compadre Ernie Brown, one of The Vindicator's three regional editors, was across from me, spewing lines as the production crew filmed him for the next commercial touting our $10 million press launch and redesign which goes live next week.

I knew I was next in line for commercialization. I had already had my mug shot for the forthcoming return to columnizing. And as I tried to ignore the odd surroundings, my e-mail became another distraction.

Folks back in Illinois – and elsewhere – were sharing the news: The Shaw Newspapers in suburban Chicago – my old stomping grounds – were shuttering their press operations and turning over that part of their production to the Arlington Heights-based Daily Herald.

The newspapers would no longer operate their own presses? Instead, they would job-out production work to their once-foe?

Many immediately thought of me and my decade-plus-long battles with the DH on behalf of Shaw properties both in McHenry and Kane counties. Two e-mailers thought enough of me to independently suggest that had I been already dead, the announcement would have caused me to spin in my grave...

Michael Miner had documented some back and forth between yours truly and Daily Herald Editor John Lampinen back in the day and for some reason Google tells me you can still read all about it here:

Liar! Liar!

LOL! It's still funny... Miner is a great writer.

This is a different era. Heck, Lampinen and I are Facebook friends and I really have a lot of respect for the way the Daily Herald has kept it's act together, especially in these difficult days for the printed medium. Lampinen and Publisher Doug Ray have a lot to be proud of and taking over the printing operations of smaller newspapers is a good step to maintain their dominance in the suburban market and keep their own staffs gainfully employed.

Another sign of the times? The days of little weeklies and smaller dailies working to cut deals with newsprint companies and keeping their operations afloat while maintaining full press and mailrooms are probably gone, especially in a crowded market like suburban Chicago. At one time – in a radius of less than 25 miles from Elgin to DeKalb to Geneva to Crystal Lake – you could find a full, independent press operation in each of those newspaper operations.

By March, that will be a distant memory.

While the revenue metrics of the traditional news media has changed, what hasn't changed is that while print advertising revenue is in decline, it still makes up the vast majority of the revenue in those soon-to-be press-less operations. Fun fact: In 2000, the average newspaper received less than 1 percent of its advertising revenue from the Internet. Ten years later, the average newspaper can expect to collect less than 10 percent of its advertising revenue from the Web.

Which means 90 percent of what you have left is still manufactured for distribution via a printing press.

Smells like newspaper spirit.

This dichotomy is being played out at newspapers across the country, especially those toying with the notion of abandoning the printing press for the digital future. Unless you have a working model to move revenue aggressively in a digital direction – which means you've cracked the atom and know something the rest of us don't – you are still largely a newspaper with a Web site that doesn't collect enough revenue to pay for the New Media team, let alone much of the content.

The smaller your circulation, the smaller your footprint on the Web to start with. The more you cut staff, especially editorial staff members, the less local unique content and the more you decrease your Web traffic. The more you gravitate toward paid content for your diminished Web site with diminished traffic, the more you sacrifice even more audience. As a result, your Internet footprint becomes even smaller.

Quite literally, more and more newspapers resemble a snake feasting on its own tail.

There is a lot of uncertainty out there. The one thing we do know is that newspapers that don't invest locally in their operations face a special peril. So, the irony struck me, as I sat there with the commercial crew feeding me lines for my big TV moment, that five years after leaving Shaw, I found myself once again at a news operation making the brave leap of a multi-million press investment, a redesign, and a commitment to the future, whatever that future turns out to be. Heck, as aggressive as this press launch appears, our Web operation is just as aggressive.

Things have certainly changed in the media world since I became enamored with the notion of knowing the news and being the first to deliver it to others when I was but a teen. More than three decades later, I am watching the digital evolution, but I am less prone to impulsive decision-making and know-it-allism than I was even a few years ago.

Nearly every prediction about what the "New Media" would be since the early 1990's has been wrong. Theories and companies and "best practices" have risen and fallen.

So what's real? Here's what I know: Next Tuesday night, the switch will be thrown on a new press and a new era of The Vindicator will be launched.

More later,


Mark