S.F. Chronicle latest paper to undergo deep cuts
Cory Bergman May 30th, 2007
Days after management announced a 25 percent staff cut in the newsroom, Managing Editor Robert Rosenthal resigned. “I really want to be in a situation where I can build something rather than take it apart,” Rosenthal said. “It might be a newspaper or it might be a new kind of news organization. I think it’s time where the skills we have as journalists can be applied in a different way. The business model for newspapers is clearly broken.”
2 Comments Add your own
1. John Proffitt | May 31st, 2007 at 2:17 am
I don’t by the idea that the business model of newspapers are broken. There’s still money to be made with news as a gathering content force. It’s just not enough to drive a publicly-traded company’s stock ever higher, which is what the nuts on Wall Street expect.
Consider if you took the Chronicle and made it into a nonprofit, or a hybrif for-profit and nonprofit business with different divisions handling different aspects of the company. You could make plenty of money for the owners to live comfortably and serve the community at the same time. Plus, if the news section is under nonprofit auspices, they can work very independently of advertiser interests and focus on the real work of journalism.
Do newspapers need to adopt modified models, think differently, act differently? Sure. But I don’t think the whole notion of reporting news + advertising and/or community support is dead. Even print isn’t dead yet, if it ever will be.
But I would agree in general that the Chronicle, or any other publicly-traded newspaper company, is not a sufficiently profitable business to make stockholders rich like Google shareholders. Newspapers, or news media organizations, have to refocus on public service rather than stock prices.
2. John Proffitt | May 31st, 2007 at 2:18 am
Whoops… that’s “buy” not “by” in the first line!
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