"Pissing off customers" no longer is a business model for newspapers that blew their chance at joining the 'Net', not fighting needed change

Jeff Jarvis with BuzzMachine.com has a helluva rant about newspaper bigwigs meeting this week in San Diego and how they "blew it" when it came to saving their industry when they damn well knew big change was coming.

Like Luther's 95 theses on the church door, his whole column should be posted in every newsroom across the country to encourage the younger generation to keep fighting the good fight against the mostly old white males running everything in the ground. Their days are numbered. Yours will be to remake what they ruined.

Jarvis wrote his piece in anticipation of a speech to the Newspaper Association of America by the head of Google, the entity widely dispised by newspapers as destroying their industry by taking away readers and classified advertising.

What these editors and publishers do not understand is that these readers, particularly the young ones, were never theirs in the first place. You're only as good as the next newspaper you put out and the technology of the moment.

Here is an excerpt:

Your Google snits don’t even address your far more profound problem: the vast majority of your potential audience who never come to your sites, the young people who will never read your newspapers. You all remember the quote from a college student in The New York Times a year ago, the one that has kept you up at night. Let’s say it together:

“If the news is that important, it will find me.”

What are you doing to take your news to her? You still expect her to come to you - to your website or to the newsstand - just because of the magnetic pull of your old brand. But she won’t, and you know it. You lost an entire generation. You lost the future of news.

You blew it.

You had a generation to reinvent the business but you did too little. I by all means include myself in that indictment because I spent my career in our industry: Guilty. I didn’t raise loud enough alarms (it felt as if they were too loud already) or accomplish enough change (not nearly enough). I blew it, too. But no last-minute hail-Mary passes will make up for our failings. Having not taken advantage of the last two decades to reinvent the news business, you’re not going to manage a rescue in two months, before the creditors come calling. That was your worst hail Mary: stoking up on debt and hoping to milk these cows for years to come. Mad cash-cow disease, that’s what too many of you had. Your other desperate moves: suddenly fantasizing that you can fix everything by going behind a wall (to tell with Google and its billions of readers!) and charging us because you think we “should” pay. Since when is a business plan built on “should?” I haven’t seen a sensible P&L justifying this dream from any of you. If you have one, please stand up show us now….. I thought so. Other desperation moves: fantasies of white knights from foundations buying you and letting you stay just the way you are…. government subsidies (do we even have to discuss the danger?)…. switching to not-for-profit, as if that suddenly takes away the need to sustain the business still… misguided, self-righteousness thinking that Google or cable companies owe you money, as if you have a God-given right to the revenue and customers you lost….. No, none of this will save newspapers and in your subconscious, at least, you know it. You know the truth.

You blew it.

So what can you do? Two years, even a year ago, I would have said that you had time to build the networks and frameworks and platforms that would support the ecosystem of news that will come next. I would have said you could retrain your staff to take on new responsibilities: organizing and supporting that ecosystem, curating the best, training people to be the best. I would have advised you to offer your staff members the opportunity to join that ecosystem, setting them up in business. I would have told you to take advantage of the efficiencies the web allows (do what you do best, link to the rest, I used to say). I would have argued that we need to invent new forms of marketing help for an entire new population of businesses-formerly-known-as-advertisers. I did say that. But the financial crisis only accelerated your fall. It didn’t cause the fall, it accelerated it. So now, for many of you, there isn’t time. It’s simply too late. The best thing some of you can do is get out of the way and make room for the next generation of net natives who understand this new economy and society and care about news and will reinvent it, building what comes after you from the ground up. There’s huge opportunity there, for them.

You blew it.

: LATER: When Eric Schmidt (of Google) did take the podium at NAA, as reported by PaidContent’s Staci Kramer, he expressed some nicely ironic befuddlement at the AP going after them when Google has “a multimillion-dollar deal with the Associated Press not only to distribute their content but also to host it on our servers.” Then he did chasten the publishers:

But Schmidt came down harder on concerns about intellectual property and fair use: “From our perspective, we look at this pretty thoroughly and there is always a tension around fair use … I would encourage everybody, think in terms of what your reader wants. These are ultimately consumer businesses and if you piss off enough of them, you will not have any more.”

Right, pissing off customers is not a business model. Not anymore.


Amen to that last line, Mr. Jarvis, particularly from my experience in watching newsroom decisionmakers during my 10 years at The Tennessean.

My, O, my, how they blew it, too.