{"id":848,"date":"2013-08-07T01:55:55","date_gmt":"2013-08-06T23:55:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/?p=848"},"modified":"2015-04-27T21:52:29","modified_gmt":"2015-04-27T19:52:29","slug":"how-to-sell-a-newspaper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/how-to-sell-a-newspaper\/","title":{"rendered":"How to sell a newspaper"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday’s news in the publishing business met with shock and horror. One of America’s most respected newspapers, The Washington Post<\/i>, was being sold<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Newspapers and publishing houses<\/span> tend to be started by individuals, then handed down<\/span> to their descendants<\/span>. So to someone in the business, selling such a company would be like selling one of his own children.<\/p>\n

The natural inclination<\/span> for many was to draw a conclusion<\/span> about the uncertain times we live in. If the Graham family, which had owned the paper for four generations, didn’t have any faith<\/span> in its own business model, the end was certainly nigh<\/span>.<\/p>\n

In the last five years, developments in the industry have been hitting the biggest names in the business.<\/p>\n

The Christian Science Monitor<\/i> became an online-only paper in October 2008. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer<\/i> followed<\/a> five months later. Denver’s venerable<\/span> Rocky Mountain News<\/i> couldn’t even maintain<\/span> its website and went out of business altogether<\/span>.<\/p>\n

This year, on May 30, The Chicago Sun-Times<\/i> fired all of its photographers<\/a>, including the winner of a Pulitzer Prize<\/a>. The paper now invites amateurs to send in their photos instead \u2014 even photos made with cell phones<\/span> \u2014 for which it will pay a fraction<\/span> of the old price.<\/p>\n

Struggling<\/span> with a mountain of debt<\/span>, The New York Times<\/i> last week sold The Boston Globe<\/i>, for which it had paid $1.1 billion, for a mere<\/span> $70 million. The Times<\/i> is owned by a family with a journalistic past; the Globe<\/i>‘s new owner is, well, a collector of sports teams.<\/p>\n

Why this is good news<\/h2>\n

This is where the Washington Post<\/i> story is different, and why it may even be good news. Its buyer is Jeff Bezos, the genius behind the online seller Amazon. If anyone is in a position to make sure the Post<\/i> remains profitable \u2014 and that newspapers in general can overcome their problems of logistics \u2014 it is Bezos.<\/p>\n

Amazon, which in the 1990s called itself “Earth’s biggest bookstore”, outcompeted<\/span> real bookstores<\/a>, partly because, without having to have showrooms<\/span> for books in pricey<\/span> downtown areas, it could offer lower prices. However, Amazon’s success has as much to do with it doing things that bricks-and-mortar<\/span> bookstores could not, or did not often do. By creating a marketplace for smaller vendors<\/span>, for example, Amazon made it possible to order nearly any book in existence and have it delivered quickly.<\/p>\n

Amazon has unerringly<\/span> kept an eye on what its customers want. The company introduced a practical e-reader at the right time and the right price, spurring<\/span> an interest in reading. And for those readers who still prefer the dead-tree edition (or wish to order other products), Amazon fundamentally redesigned its gigantic warehouses<\/span>, optimizing them<\/a> for fleets<\/span> of robots.<\/p>\n

Bezos is the founder of Amazon, and he still runs it, so it’s safe to say<\/span> either that those ideas were his or that he’s a great listener.<\/p>\n

Innovations like these could greatly help the newspaper industry, which is torn<\/span> between: customers who want a paper edition printed and delivered to their house, but don’t understand the high cost of that service; advertisers who aren’t willing to pay for online advertising; a for-profit news industry that is increasingly owned by just a few large corporations<\/span>; and readers who see any newspaper’s website as just one of a million websites where they can get their information.<\/p>\n

Family-owned businesses can have their blind spots<\/span>, and it takes a great deal of<\/span> humility<\/span> to admit that. “The Post<\/i> could have survived under the company’s ownership and been profitable for the foreseeable future,” said Washington Post<\/i> chief executive Donald E. Graham, “but we wanted to do more than survive. I’m not saying this guarantees success, but it gives us a much greater chance of success.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday’s news in the publishing business met with shock and horror. One of America’s most respected newspapers, The Washington Post, was being sold. Newspapers and publishing houses tend to be started by individuals, then handed down to their descendants. So to someone in the business, selling such a company would be like selling one of his own children. The natural … >><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[72,33,109],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/848"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=848"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/848\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1683,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/848\/revisions\/1683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}