No. I am not talking about the market in which I am involved with daily: the housing market. Actually, sales were up a bit as of last February.
Rather, the industry which is hurting big time is professional journalism; newspapers, to be precise.
“The news business is something worse than horrible. If that’s the future, we don’t have much of a future,” Sam Zell, who bought the Tribune Company last year, said recently in The Baltimore Sun.
“I’m an optimist, but it is very hard to be positive about what’s going on,” said Brian P. Tierney, who bought The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Philadelphia Daily News in 2006.
“The near term and medium term at the paper is more negative than what we expected,” said OhSang Kwon of Avista Capital Partners, which bought The Minneapolis Star-Tribune in late 2006.
These are all smart businesspeople, with significant success in other endeavors, who took a hard look at the wave-tossed publishing sector and appointed themselves as life savers. And very soon after jumping in, they too began foundering in the tall waves.
On Thursday, it was reported in Crain’s New York Business that Mr. Zell has put Newsday, one of Tribune’s more lucrative assets, on the auction block. In January, Mr. Tierney told unions at his papers that the company was confronting a “dire situation” and needed to cut expenses by 10 percent to meet debt payments.
And in Minneapolis last week, the paper’s publisher, Chris Harte, met with union leaders to discuss a “precipitous” drop in revenue that will make it difficult for the company to meet its obligations, according to MinnPost, a daily news site.
The industry may not be touching bottom any time soon. Last year, overall newspaper revenues dropped by about 7 percent, pushed along primarily by the secular change of readers and advertisers fleeing to the Web. And publishing, along with many other kinds of businesses, is now staring at a full-bore recession, led by the credit crisis that is fanning out across the economy.
For at least a couple of years, I have been predicting radical changes in both the formation of daily newspapers and their delivery. At least 50% of what you receive on the front stoop every morning is history. That is - it surely is when contrasted with what you can find in seconds by firing up your PC. Add in the cost of print and delivery . . . . We're talking about a model which by pure logic seems to be defying the odds to survive.
I am not someone who is cheering for "professional journalism" to go under, nor for reporters to shrivel up and die. Nevertheless, I am one who believes that we are undergoing radical changes in how news and opinion is delivered, and that those changes will continue for some time. Furthermore, you can put me down as one who thinks that at some point in the not terrifically distant future, "newspapers" no longer will be available every morning by carrier.
While I'm not certain of how the industry will morph into the future, nor how journalists will survive down the road (and yes, I do feel confident that they shall!), the newspaper of today will not. One day, it will be relegated to history books - along with buggy whips, typewriters and record albums. You are witnessing the trip to the dustbin as I type.