Excerpt
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): .... The latest turn in the evolving business of newspapers.
After years of being one part of the media’s broader strategy to grow and diversify, companies now are shedding print altogether. Gannett, which owns USA Today and many other papers, became the latest to spin off its print operations last week, that a day after The Tribune Company made a similar move, and days after E.W. Scripps and Journal Communications announced similar plans as part of a merger.
Ken Doctor covers media for his website, Newsonomics, and his column for the Nieman Journalism Lab.
Ken Doctor, welcome to the program.
And I have just named some of the spinoffs that have happened. Why is this happening now?
KEN DOCTOR, Newsonomics: Well, it’s financial. It’s Wall Street.
If you look at what’s happened with the newspaper industry, it’s been really a long dissent. Profits are down, work forces are down, products are thinner. And the broadcast industry is much healthier. So, on Wall Street, you want a healthy business. You don’t want the distressed business.
Essentially, the newspaper business is being sequestered or separated out from these better broadcast assets.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So, this idea of having multiple platforms with television, with print and digital, that’s just gone goodbye?
KEN DOCTOR: It is kind of ironic now, because we heard from the CEOs of these diversified companies that synergy was very important.
And, of course, on our smartphones and our tablets, we expect video from newspaper companies and we expect stories from broadcast companies. And one idea here was multiplatform, multidevice. But now these companies are separate.
So, importantly, this is a financial move. It’s not a strategic one and may not really be in the best interests of the communities they serve or their readers.
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