Tribune revamping business model, websites

Liz Foreman June 5th, 2008

Check out this memo from Tribune bosses Sam Zell and Randy Michaels, detailing the planned overhaul of their business model. It starts:

Instead of recapping our first quarter numbers, which you can see in our news release online, we want to get to the heart of what we’re sure all of you are focused on after our earnings call today — our discussion around the changing business model for publishing.

Part of the tune-up includes newspaper and TV station website revamps, “which will be a primary source of revenue in our future.”

In addition, they plan a “50/50 ad-to-editorial ratio base” for their newspapers, which means a significant reduction in the number of printed pages… and staff.

What has become clear as we have gotten intimately familiar with the business is that the model for newspapers no longer works. Supply and demand are not in balance, and that manifests itself in two ways:

1. We are not giving readers what they want, and
2. We are printing bigger papers than we can afford to print

By the way, the Zell-Michaels team has sent out some incredibly straightforward memos recently, which are available on Romensko.

Update: NYTimes.com has a story on it: “They also said the struggling company has looked at the column inches of news produced by each reporter, and by each paper’s news staff. Finding wide variation, they said, they have concluded that it could do without a large number of news employees and not lose much content.”