Being a journalism major, I have heard for a long time that newspapers are dying and the world of journalism is changing drastically. When I got to DC, big surprise, I heard the exact same thing from big name people in the business. We keep hearing how new media and blogs are one of the main reasons for this fall of the newspaper. Debate rages on over people preferring to have the printed form, wanting to get down and dirty with the ink when they read their news vs getting the breaking news from blogs or Twitter that do not go through channels before distributing the information.
One thing I learned amidst the debate is that newspapers have a long standing history of having huge profit margins. It brings up one question to me: Are newspapers being killed by new media or are they committing suicide by having huge profit margins?
I did not think it was fair to look at newspaper in that manner, even though I heard the statement from a trusted source, so I went to forbes.com and did some research on the matter looking at two of the biggest newspapers in the country, Washington Post and NY Times, and two of the biggest private companies in the country, Wal-Mart and Dell.
The Post had a Gross Profit Margin of 54.6%, and the NY Times was similar with 57.8%. Guess what Wal-Mart and Dell’s gross profit margins are? 26.3% and 19.6%, respectively.
Those gross profit margins are for the last 12 months for each company, so that is not going back to when the Newspapers were dominating the news world. Are you surprised they have such huge margins yet complaining they are dying and having to cut back on resources? Can they not cut back on the huge profit margins to 30%, 25% and give more resources to their journalists who are complaining about having to work longer, harder, on more stories and feel like their depth and coverage of each story is suffering?
Small, niche papers are not having the huge problems to the same degree as the larger papers, from what I have heard. But then again they do not have the huge profit margins either. For them it is more of a passion and love than a money making career.
Given, a lot of people my age love to get their news online through many different outlets, for many different reason. However, lets quit saying the new
courtesy Neal Goodson
online outlets are killing the print newspaper until we know for a fact they are doing so. To me it seems more like the newspapers are killing themselves, much like a person that only eats steak and refuses to eat chicken or hamburger. Are you going to starve yourself to death if you can not get the steak or cave in and eat the hamburger? That is not anyone’s fault but your own if you do not lower your standards in order to stay alive.
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