Out with the Dead Wood for Newspapers

Yes, all newspaper publishers will have to convert their dailies to online. Here's how it might work

By Rick Wartzman

Well before he began thinking and writing about management, Peter Drucker learned firsthand the joys of journalism and the perils of economic crisis. In fact, when he was a young reporter in Germany in October 1929, his very first story for the Frankfurter General-Anzeiger was about the New York stock market crash.

Still, it's hard to imagine that even Drucker could have foreseen the astonishingly rapid decline of the newspaper industry itself.

Already under tremendous pressure from readers shifting their eyes to the Internet, one media giant after another these days is finding the recession too much to bear. Tribune Co., publisher of the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times (my old employer), has filed for bankruptcy. So have the owners of The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News and Minneapolis' Star Tribune. Denver's Rocky Mountain News has stopped publishing. Hearst Corp. is threatening to take the San Francisco Chronicle off life support, and Gannett (GCI) may close down the Tucson Citizen.

Nobody has an easy answer. But Drucker surely would have called for something that has, by and large, been missing from the scene: a genuine boldness and decisiveness of action by top management. To stop the red ink, newspapers need to get rid of the ink altogether. It's high time for online-only operations.

"Every decision is like surgery," Drucker wrote in The Effective Executive, his 1967 classic. "It is an intervention into a system and therefore carries with it the risk of shock. One does not make unnecessary decisions any more than a good surgeon does unnecessary surgery." And yet, despite the dangers, Drucker was quick to add that "one has to make a decision when a condition is likely to degenerate if nothing is done."

Change Becomes Opportunity

"This also applies with respect to opportunity," Drucker explained. "If the opportunity is important and is likely to vanish unless one acts with dispatch, one acts—and one makes a radical change."

This is precisely what newspapers must recognize: They have to grab the future that's right in front of them—and before it's too late. For long-established businesses, this can be terribly difficult.

"Innovation requires us to systematically identify changes that have already occurred in a business—in demographics, in values, in technology—and then to look at them as opportunities," Drucker asserted in a 1996 interview. "It also requires something that is most difficult for existing companies to do: to abandon rather than defend yesterday."

As a guy who loves to go out and pick up the three newspapers that land on my front lawn every morning, I'm sorry to say it's inescapable: The Web needs to be embraced much more fully than most papers have done. This means no more tentative, halfway initiatives. Dead-tree editions must immediately yield to all-Internet operations. The presses need to stop forever, with the delivery trucks shunted off to the scrapyard.

Some may be moving this way. Hearst's Seattle Post-Intelligencer is evidently contemplating shuttering its print edition and going totally online. Bigger newspapers need to take the leap, too.

How It Might Work at the L.A. Times

How realistic is this? To get a sense, I called an old friend and colleague, Russ Stanton, who is now the editor of the Los Angeles Times, and asked him what the paper would look like if it were available strictly on the Web.