We journalists have always recognized the tendency to kill the messenger – because people often take out their frustrations on those who tell them what they don’t want to hear.
The messenger is not the cause of the bad tidings, but it’s easier to blame that messenger than to change the event he or she is reporting.
John Paton, CEO of the Journal Register group of newspapers, delivered a message last week that many Texas community newspapers might not want to hear – but it’s an important message we should all pay attention to.
Paton, in a speech to the Transformation of News Summit in Cambridge, Mass., put on by the International Newsmedia Marketing Association, said newspapers need to be “digital first” in everything they do.
Paton is no ivory-tower news philosopher. The Journal Register group has been living by that principle for the past year. The result: a company that was virtually bankrupt a year ago will have profit margins of about 15 percent this year.
The Journal Register has no papers in Texas – it publishes about 170 daily and weekly papers in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Connecticut, New York and New Jersey. And its total online audience is bigger than its print audience. Paton’s approach has been to outsource everything he can to other companies who can do it cheaper or better and to put the digital editions at the heart of his business.
The staff of the Center urges Texas publishers and other journalists to read what Paton has to say. Admittedly, he is talking about a newspaper group with some unique circumstances half a nation away. We’re certainly not urging most Texas publishers to adopt the Journal Register business model. But based on all the evidence we see, that model is the future.
Not today’s future, or tomorrow’s, or maybe even the next few years – but the inevitable future for what we now know as newspapers.
Even the Journal Register company still publishes ink-on-paper editions, but the core of their enterprise is now digital.
So take a few minutes to read Paton’s explanation of what his company has done. This explanation goes into the background of their decision to go digital-first and how they pulled it off.
And while the core of the enterprise for most of us is still print and will be for the foreseeable future, we must pay attention to ventures like this and give some thought to the digital transformation we will all eventually undergo.