Brand. New. Thinking.

When the Hearst Corporation announced on Feb. 26 that it would sell or close the San Francisco Chronicle if it couldn’t lay off significant numbers of employees, the question had to be asked: was this a negotiating ploy with the union or a yet another stake in an old paradigm?

I’m going to step out on my limb to say: both, and I’ll stay there to tell you how I see things.  This was hardly an isolated announcement, making the union angle the lesser motive.  The Philadelphia Inquirer had filed for bankruptcy on the 23rd and the Rocky Mountain News closed on the 27th.  The Chicago Tribune announced it’s bankruptcy filing on December 8 of last year.  The Los Angeles Times and San Jose Mercury News have made cuts and mandated rolling unpaid furloughs following cuts and one can only expect more cuts along the way.

In short, venerable news organizations are having to do more with less manpower and the barn door is wide open for alternative media to step in.  What are those alternative media?  The immediate answer is always online.  That’s another marker of this era.  But I’d like to suggest that’s not the only answer.

Circulation of daily newspapers has seen a steady decline for years.  The reason?  Likely some combination of the pace of life where no one has the requisite hour or more to give a daily paper its due.  It started as we read only a section, and then a section every other day or once a week.  Television news cut that hour or more down to less than twenty minutes.  Intelligent minds lamented the lack of depth in the coverage, and turned to weekly magazines.  Weekly neighborhood papers carried the very local news in a digestable weekly format.  More and more our favorite portals pushed news headlines to us that we could click on for links to more in depth reporting.  Our cell phones can collect the in-depth reporting for us to select when we have time to plug in to podcasts.  We decide in the car on radio of our choosing.  A whole new digital signage medium can be programmed to local-cast everything from corporate to community messaging – and advertising localized to geographic and neighborhood audiences.

There are lots of conclusions to be drawn from all these trends but the biggest is that we’ve moved beyond the era of one-size-fits-all journalism.  The 11 o’clock news is broadcast at 9 and 10 as well as 11.  24-hour news channels let us opt-in to news on our schedule.  The Internet lets us opt-in to blogs, podcasts, portals and chat.  We become reporters on Twitter and a whole variety of social media, which give new meaning to the tried and true cliché “up to the minute.”  This is the age of the opt-in audience.  There have been no demographic or psychographic studies on that segment.

There’s a new news-game in town and no one knows yet what it is.  The question of how we maintain the value of trained and disciplined journalism teeters under the weight of a broken business model – expenses without revenues to sustain them. National Public Radio has been reporting on this all week and a new study is out from the Pew Charitable Trust. http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1133/decline-print-newspapers-increased-online-news

Let me know what you think.

Mcurtis@pacifico.com