Beyond the words

Yesterday saw an almost hysterical call by The Philadelphia Daily News for Craig Newmark, whose free classifieds model is demolishing the most valuable classifieds sections of newspapers, to set up "Craig's Foundation" to, amongst other things, "build...a retirement home for any newspaper folks who might somehow see a diminished pension down the road". Wow. Terry Heaton comments with due incredulity that the writer "sounds a bit like a whale oil spokesman casting aspersions on Thomas Edison", Nick  Douglas at HuffPo says that it's like "asking Gutenberg to please fund the monks". Quite so.

Now, I've commented before that journalists are hardly unique is disliking change - dislike of change is a wholly explicable and reasonable human survival trait. It's not really news that some journalists are feeling pressure from the web, or that what was once a successful bundling strategy - the newspaper - has, like the CD and the TV network, found itself unbundled and the parts of the package re-examined for value in light of the digital revolution. Talking about this digital unbundling in the WSJ last month William Bulkely noted that "the internet allows consumers to trim wasteful purchases" and at Slate Jack Shafer summarised his key themes:

"the photographic film industry, encyclopedia publishers, the music industry, and the advertising industry feasted on buyers by forcing them to purchase things they didn't want—prints of all 24 shots from their camera or a whole album to secure one favorite song, for example. "The business models required customers to pay for detritus to get the good stuff," Bulkeley writes. But digital cameras, the Web, iTunes, and search-related advertising have stripped those industries of their power to charge for detritus."

And as I never tire of quoting Jay Small on the fate of newspapers, I'll do so again: "must we live or die by the bundle? I think not. Unbundling and examining each value proposition for its new media potential would be the best way to manage both cost and revenue curves. Jettison those little things a newspaper does because they make sense in the bundle, if they don't make sense apart from it."

Now, what about that unbundling, specifically the unbundling of newspapers, does yesterdays Philadelphia Daily News rant (yes, it was a rant) tell us? Perhaps that one of the wasteful purchases that the internet allows consumers to trim is the journalism component of the newspaper. I've said before that outside the newspaper bundle, hard news is hard to monetise. And I've pointed out (as has the AJR) that the high-minded journalism that goes into newspapers just doesn't seem to be what people are most keen to read once the newspaper package is unbundled online. The writers at PDN seem to find the unbundling of their newspaper's lucrative classifieds section especially threatening, but look at what that threat means - they think, openly, that readers will not pay enough to fund their writing, in isolation, when given a genuinely free choice.

When Knight Ridder broke up, McClatchy bought the old Knight Ridder papers and then sold on a number of them. Two of these, the Philadelphia Inquirer and - indeed - the Philadelphia Daily News, went to private equity - Philadelphia Media Holdings, headed by Brian Tierney who is now both the CEO of the holding company and publisher of both newspapers. The two papers have failed to meet the revenue targets that their new private equity owners put in place when they bought them, causing much talk of substantial lay-offs. Much of that problem stems from the flight of classified inventory, and therefore revenue, to the web, and especially to Craig Newmark's free model. Hence, pretty evidently, the almost hysterical  bitterness of the writers at PDN. (I'd also add, as pure speculation, that it seems likely to me that this latest article presages some big news coming out of Philadelphia Media Holdings soon. But as I say, that's just speculation.)

But let's put the matter in perspective. Craig Newmark has not done a bad thing here, as some very far from disinterested commentators are claiming. By unbundling the classified ads from the news, Craigslist has done nothing more sinister than given the (ex) readers of the Philadelphia Daily News more choice. That they've chosen not to keep reading the paper is an indictment of the journalists writing there, not Craig. So let me put it like this. He gave your readers more choices, and they chose not to read you any more. If people don't want to read what you write, you don't get paid. Them's the breaks.