Newspaper News for 2008
A selection of articles which represent the overall trends for 2008
January Media Stocks Near 52 Week Lows – “The world is going to hell in a hand basket, the economy is in the dumper, movie stars are dying, and there is a heated election process going on in the free world. One would think this is a glorious time to be operating as a news organization, but the market told us otherwise today.”
Best Southwest Citizen on the decline of the newspaper – “A number of displaced newspaper journalists like myself are entering the blogosphere and taking our readers with us. When you combine us with the numerous …” also references mulshine
The Year in Online Newspaper Advertising: a Brief Overview -from Clickz “According to the Newspaper Association of America, online paper sites brought in $749.8 million in Q3, a drop of 3 percent from a year before.” Notes Layoffs will get worse in 2009
-Mulshine’s original anti blogger post on WSJ.com
-Metaprinter’s Paul Mulshine reaction here
-Jay Rosen’s reaction here
-instapundit’s reaction here -A Blog Around The Clock’s thorough reaction here (you must also visit this site to marvel at his header image. It is beautiful)
- any twitter reactions? tag them with #mulshine
Down to business now. So Paul Mulshine works for the Newark New Jersey Star-Ledger. For the sake of full disclosure I worked there my self until this June when I took a buyout from the pressroom. I’ve since received my MA from NYU, blog, and do consulting work. Mulshine wrote an Opinion piece in the Weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal which boils down to: bloggers are idiots, they aren’t real journalists. Continue reading →
To answer Mr. Mulshine’s question; What is the New Model for generating revenue? The answer for general interest newspapers and news sites is that there is none. NONE. That’s no mystery. Continue reading →
You can’t get more “hyperlocal” than a newspaper serving a population of 1000. This is the purest attempt at Hyperlocal that I’ve ever read about, a very small operation covering a very small population. It has been said before that hyperlocal fails because the advertising cannot support it. So what happened in this situation? Something new and unexpected? Nope, from publisher Mitch Traphagen, “It literally came to an end, the ad revenues,”.
It should be pretty obvious by now that advertising revenues cannot support general interest news operations by now. The Krugman Paradox and Publisher’s Dilemma spell this out pretty clearly.
What about donations? What about Spot.us? Barring a generous grant or donation, this model will also fail. Spot.us might be a nice niche alternative for the San Francisco Bay area, but I don’t see the model working for small-town USA. There just isn’t enough disposable income floating around for the model to work. Continue reading →
Chicago’s Premier Newspaper Group Announces A New, Reader-Friendly
Format, A Refreshing New Design And A Pledge To Increase Local News
Coverage in the Elgin, Illinois, Area
CHICAGO, Dec 26, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) –
Sun-Times Media Group, Inc. (OTCBB:SUTM), continuing its commitment to being the Chicago area’s best source of local news and information, announced today some exciting new format changes to The Courier News, the daily newspaper of record for Elgin, Illinois, and surrounding communities. Continue reading →
Remember when we used to call Santa to listen to his stories and tell him what we wanted for Christmas? The internet killed off that wonderful childhood activity of mine. But now we have an interactive NORAD / GOOGLE MAPS mashup!! ahhh… progress? Scramble the jets!!!!!! Continue reading →
Big Gains Among Top 30 Newspaper Web Sites -from editor&publisher …They boldly claim that the StarTribune.com has experienced 265% growth for the month of November. The problem is that when you look at the big picture you can easily see that site traffic has been flat for about 2 years.
Apparently my letter below was published in the December 2008 / January 2009 issue of Fast Company magazine on page 30. My comments are in response to this article by Robert Scoble. Adrian Holovaty’s name is published incorrectly (as Holloway), so I just wanted to correct it here.
Mr. Scoble,
I’m really disappointed with the example you gave of “newspaper innovation”. The Star-Ledger’s newscast is more of the same middle of the road junk application we need less of. This is about as industry saving as putting a newspaper widget on a MySpace page.
In a December 5, 2008 interview with WhatTheyThink.com staff, VistaPrint CEO Robert Keane expressed his opinion that he is “extremely pessimistic about the economy”. VistaPrint (VPRT) is a leading online supplier of high-quality graphic design services and customized printed products to small businesses and consumers to 16 million customers worldwide with over $400 million in annual sales as of the last fiscal year. They cater to small businesses and their average order generates just $33 in revenue. I recommend reading the entire WTT interview here but to summarize Keane’s comments, Continue reading →
My M.A. Thesis which was just completed two weeks ago goes into great detail how general interest newspaper websites are not now, and will never be capable of generating economically sustainable revenue. There is a huge difference between covering payroll expenses and achieving Economic Sustainability; Having a mechanism in place for generating, or gaining access to, the economic resources necessary to keeping the business operating on an ongoing basis. Continue reading →
As part of their plan to move forward, the Detroit newspapers announced that their newspapers would be, “Providing subscribers daily access to electronic editions, exact copies of each day’s printed newspapers delivered to your email”.
I don’t get it.
Snuggling up with a good book is a wonderful way to spend quiet time, to become deeply engrossed in the story, to lose one’s self in it and even become a character. Reading a book is a solitary experience. This holds true with the e-book experience as well. What I don’t understand is the newspaper industry’s fascination with e-editions. For as many years as the Amazon Kindle has been around, newspaper have attempted to sell or give away e-editions as an important revenue stream. Websites like metafilter, digg, reddit, delicious, etc… exist because news articles are political in nature. We share those stories, rant, rave, email, tag, bookmark, blog… what value does an e-edition provide? Continue reading →
“There’s always a new Luddism whenever there’s change.” – interview by Russ Juskalian from Columbia Journalism Review -Go read this interview it is great!
from the interview, “What the Internet has actually done is not decimate literary reading; that was really a done deal by 1970. What it has done, instead, is brought back reading and writing as a normal activity for a huge group of people.”
That’s a great point, and one that newspaper and television owners, I suspect, are terrified of. People are now “distracted” by doing things other than reading a newspaper or watching television.
New York Times (NYT): Here’s How Much Cash We Need To Survive -from AlleyInsider.com “a schedule of how much cash the NYTCo needs to come up with and when. Barring asset sales or further deterioration of the business, here’s the bottom line for the next three years…”
Twitter’s hunting for a moneymaker -from Cnet “Another sign that Twitter is finally growing up: The company has put out a job posting hunting for a product manager to help it start raking in revenue.” which answers the most oft asked question by traditional media, “…yes, but how will you make money?”
A Scenario For News -from BuzzMachine “there’s no one permalink summarizing my apparently endless prognostication. So here is a snapshot of – a strawman for – where I think particularly local news might go”
Most Emailed News: All The News That’s Fit To Link -via MagnetBox “You know the most emailed news is gonna be a good read since a lot of people took the extra step to tell a friend. MostEmailedNews.com takes those boxes from a bunch of popular different news sources and puts them all together for you on one concise page.”
Q&A with MetaFilter.com founder Matt Haughey. As Wikipedia defines it, MetaFilter is a community weblog whose purpose is to share links and discuss interesting content that users have discovered on the web. From personal use I know that Ask.MetaFilter.com is one of the most useful sites anywhere for “querying the hive mind”. Enjoy!
RI -“MetaFilter is one of the oldest (1999) online social sites. Whatkeeps it going where others fail? (Author’s note, I think of mefi a as social site but only in the broadest of terms. Or rather, it’s become more social over the years (the first few years, there wasn’t all that much discussion on the posts, now the most popular posts have hundreds of comments)…”
MH -It has consistently grown ever since early 2000, when I think it hit enough of a critical mass to be interesting. As to why it keeps going – it probably has something to do with it being what it is first and foremost. When I think of other online social sites that come and go, they’re largely offshoots of some other service that didn’t fit quite right. MetaFilter has always kind of been its own thing and has stayed interesting enough to attract interesting people that continue to contribute to it everyday. Continue reading →
Here is Dave Hunke, CEO of Detroit Media Partnership and Publisher of the Detroit Free Press:
“The dynamics of delivering information to audiences has changed forever due to technology. Today, consumers are more empowered than ever before. In order to serve them well, we must find ways to be more nimble. That means we have to change the way we deliver that news – not just in subtle ways, but in fundamental ways.”
I applaud the effort to innovate their business model. I have some serious reservations about their strategy however. Simply going online will not save the news business. Bragging that you’ve had “50 million pageviews” and “won Pulitzer Prizes”, while not being able to become economically sustainable should raise red flags about how inefficient newspaper websites are. Continue reading →
Paul Anger, vice president of news and editor of the Detroit Free …
Detroit Free Press, United States – 27 minutes ago
The Detroit Free Press announced today a first-of-its-kind plan in the struggling US newspaper industry — emphasizing more online delivery of news and …
Detroit dailies curtail home delivery, boost e-editions
Bizjournals.com, NC – 39 minutes ago
The Detroit News — owned by Denver-based MediaNews Group Inc. — and another Detroit daily newspaper, the Free Press, faced with one executive called a fight …
Detroit Newspapers Confirm Plans To Limit Home Delivery
CNNMoney.com – 1 hour ago
The publishers of the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News confirmed Tuesday that they will limit home delivery to three days a week in order to shift …
The recent BreakingViews.com article: Murdoch Investors Are Groaning suggested that Rupert Murdoch overpaid when News Corp. (NWS) acquired Dow Jones for $5.6 billion. Here’s what they said:
“Still, to be charitable, assume Dow Jones is worth half the $3 billion it traded at before Mr. Murdoch made his offer. On that basis, News Corporation shareholders forfeited $3.5 billion of value to the Bancrofts and their fellow shareholders.”
MediaNews Sees Bad Timing on Newspapers, Not Bad Bets -from NYTimes.com “Dean Singleton expanded his newspaper empire at the worst possible time” oh yeah, when was that? after the internet was invented? Jeeze, think of how many programmers and developers that money could have been used for.
Canadians Miss Out On Doctor Who Season Finale -from Slashdot by timothy
-darthcamaro writes “Canadians were among the last people in the world to get the season 4 finale of Doctor Who which already aired in the UK and Australia. The Canadian public broadcaster — CBC — decided to cut out nearly 20 minutes from the episode, leaving fans wondering what was going on. Doctor Who isn’t the easiest show to follow at the best of times — but Canadians are now up in arms (or at least hockey sticks) over their taxpayer-funded broadcaster’s lack of respect for SciFi hosers.”
Detroit Papers Set To Curtail Print -from WSJ.com
“end home delivery on all but the most lucrative days — Thursday, Friday and Sunday. On the other days, the company would sell single copies of abbreviated print editions at newsstands and direct readers to the papers’ expanded digital editions.”
I talk a lot about paradigm shifts, and economic sustainability. Other pundits wax romantic about the loss of long form journalism. But perhaps the greatest losses will be those which are unanticipated.
Not Tonight Dear, I’d Rather Blog -from WSJ.com “An online survey commissioned by Intel has found, among other things, that 46% of women would rather go without sex for two weeks than give up the Internet for that long. The numbers get bigger for certain age groups; 49% of women aged 18-34 would make that choice, and 52% of women aged 35-44.”
You’re Not Going To Win A Pulitzer Prize -from Seth’s Blog “As newspapers melt all around us, faster and faster, the people in the newspaper business persist in believing that the important element of a news-paper is the paper part.”
Some poor misguided soul has taken it upon himself to save the $ulzbergers from a paradigm shift. That the company is still paying a dividend is reason enough not to donate. But I could think of many more. Some other person is trying to “save” the industry one tshirt at a time.
Despite the Tribune Company’s announcement Monday that it is voluntarily filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, the rest of newspaper industry shouldn’t worry just yet. MU journalism professor Jacqui Banaszynski said,
“I think it’s not just a problem with the industry,” she said. “I think it’s a problem with our society.”
Sam Zell blames the economy… Really? REALLY?
1. Acknowledge that your “value” prior to the ubiquity of the Internet was your stranglehold on content delivery. You filled the needs of businesses and individuals seeking a platform to advertise their products and services to an audience within a geographic area.
2. To reiterate, your journalism was a nice plus, but the unmet need that your newspaper filled were things like the classifieds section, home sales, movie times, stock quotes, television listings, sports scores, betting lines, puzzles, and comics.
3. Did you just poopie in your pants a little bit? You should have because everything I listed is now being better served on the internet.
4. For god’s sake lets move forward as an industry by saying, the fundamentals of this business have changed. How can we make money in the new paradigm. That’s right I said money.
Milton Friedman says that a business has only one responsibility, “economic performance”. Peter Drucker says that a business’s first responsibility is, “economic performance”.
In December 2004, a mock documentary about the future of news began making the rounds of the nation’s journalists and Web professionals.
The video, produced by two aspiring newsmen fresh from college, envisioned a nightmare scenario – by the year 2014, technology would effectively destroy traditional journalism.
In 2008, Google, the search engine company, would merge with Amazon.com, the giant online retailer, and in 2010 the new “Googlezon” would create a system edited entirely by computers that would strip individual facts and sentences from all content sources to create stories tailored to the tastes of each person.
A year later, The New York Times would sue Googlezon for copyright infringement and lose before the Supreme Court.
Will the New York Times be around in 2011? If they are not around, who will protect us from Googlezon? And who were these two “visionaries”? I demand answers.
I’ve been looking everywhere but I simply cannot find one single general news site that is economically sustainable. I’m asking my readers to present me with a verifyable example of the existence of such a site. I’m looking to refute the following claims:
If confronted with the decision to receive a identical newspapers, one with advertisements in it and one with NO advertisements in it, which would you select?
if your job influences your answer, please disclose.
Clarification added 20 hours ago:
STOP adding your own caveats!!!! This is a theoretical question.
If confronted with the decision to receive identical newspapers (im presenting you one in one hand and one in the other hand), the only difference being one with advertisements in it and one with NO advertisements in it, which would you select?
Clarification added 1 minute ago:
Wow, ok lets try this…. the situation happens on a planet where everything is free. the only decision point is that one paper contains advertisements the other does not…
I asked the above question on linkedin and half the answers to the question are, “a newspaper without ads is impossible”!!! Thanks buddy. Oh, wait, you didn’t even come close to answering the question.
Weymouth: WaPo ‘must be the indispensible guide to Washington’ -from Politico.com “focus our increasingly scarce resources on things that will make us indispensable to our customers, and thus create value for our business, while eliminating efforts that no longer make a difference to our readers.”
The New York Times Cash Crunch -from Gawker.com “Though apologist analyst were apparently out in force, and though the firm bragged about selling $1 million in Barack Obama knicknacks (whee!), there was no hiding the New York Times Company’s financial distress at a bank’s media conference in New York Tuesday.”
Poor Chicago -from BuzzMachine Is Jeff Jarvis the real “grave dancer”?
The Newspaper Industry and The Future of Journalism -from AmericanUniversity Radio “A panel joins guest host Katty Kay to discuss how the on-going recession is affecting the already struggling industry and what it could mean for how Americans get their news.”
While researching information from my Thesis I ran across this unsettling bit of data from the Newspaper National Network website. It appears on the homepage in the green sidebar.
“Ad wantedness” is highest in newspapers. In fact, one recent study, reported that 90% of consumers prefer newspapers with ads to newspapers without ads. Newspapers are the primary source for shopping information for most product categories, with 52% of people seeing ads as “valuable” when planning their shopping. -Jason E. Klein President and CEO Newspaper National Network, LP
The statement is aimed at marketing people and is meant to sell them on the benefits of advertising in a newspaper. I thought maybe I misread it but sure enough, holy cow! This is extremely troubling news for newspapers. When I read that first sentence I interpret it as, “only 10% of newspaper readers purchase the paper purely for it’s content -consumers prefer newspapers with ads to newspapers without ads”.
Tribune Company Files for Bankruptcy -from NYTimes.com I got the alert for this yesterday via wsj.com It was a paid only article. 2takeaways from the experience. 1. you want beaking news first? Pay for it. 2. we may see a rapid division of upper and lower class as less fortunate people rely on free sources of news.
if gamers ran the world -from Infovore via kottke “So what does a future run by gamers look like? Well, if they can handle complexity, and they’ve stocked up all the magic item chests ready for when scarcity hits” this is amazing
11% Increase from Q3 ’07, Up Slightly from Q2 ’08 Despite U.S. Economic Woes
NEW YORK, NY (November 20, 2008) — The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) today announced that Internet advertising revenues reached almost $5.9 billion for the third quarter of 2008, representing an 11 percent increase over the same period in 2007. While double-digit annual growth continues, the quarter-to-quarter curve remains relatively flat compared to recent past performance. The Q3 2008 figures, published in the IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report, are 2 percent higher than the Q2 2008 results. Set against strong economic headwinds in the U.S. economy, Q3 ’08’s $5.9 billion represents nonetheless the second-highest quarter results ever. For the first nine months of 2008, revenues totaled $17.3 billion, up from $15.2 billion in the same period a year ago and surpassing the record set in the first nine months of 2007 by nearly 14 percent. -from IAB
Print and online newspaper advertising revenue plunged 18.11 percent in the third quarter of this year — the worst decline by far in the nearly four decades the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) has been tracking quarterly performance. After its first ever reported drop in online ad revenue in Q2 2008, the industry drifted another few notches in Q3. According to the Newspaper Association of America, online paper sites brought in $749.8 million in Q3, a drop of 3 percent from a year before.
Tribune is preparing for a possible bankruptcy-protection filing as soon as=
this week, according to people familiar with the matter, opening a new fro=
nt of trouble for the newspaper industry.=20
As Tribune continues discussions with its lenders to rework its debt load, =
the newspaper-and-television concern in recent days has hired Lazard as its=
financial adviser and a legal counsel for a possible trip through bankrupt=
cy court.
For more information: http://online.wsj.com
–The announcement above just gave the post below a greater sense of urgency–
I’m looking to get information about an idea that is floating around with more and more regularity from the newspaper industry “experts” and “commentators”. The idea is turning a failing for-profit newspaper into a non-profit news source. I’m not sure why a newspaper would want to do this. That’s why I’m reaching out to experts in finance and law. Continue reading →
I introduce you to the fundamental problem of newspapers on the internet – The Krugman Paradox - named by me after watching PetMeds.com ads appear next to Paul Krugman for three days after it was announced he won a Nobel Prize. I couldn’t believe there wasn’t a better way to monetize his presence on NYTimes.com. Further investigation revealed that the Krugman problem was not unique. Here goes, I want feedback.
Definition:
The Krugman Paradox is a phenomenon referring to newspapers’ websites and the site’s inability to produce economically sustainable advertising revenue, despite their highest audience reach in the history of their industry. The paradox indicates that newspapers must increase the effectiveness of their online advertising if this is to be their main revenue stream.
Twitscoop.com -”We could tell you how we combined cutting-edge financial markets mathematics with Ruby and Jabber magics but we won’t. We’d rather have you tell us what doesn’t work in our algorithm by sending us an email to feedback [at] twitscoop [dot] com – we know we still have a long way to go and are prepared to work on it.”
Survival is Competitive Differentiation -from Gigaom .whether you own a pizza shop, or General Electric, these are probably ideas you have considered. Read through the comments section.
Neighborhood Watch Puts Florida Home Sales on the Map -from MediaShift .The article is about the st. Petersburg Times Django database for house hunting, but it raises other points about traditional media’s failings. I love this example, “There are two crimes I care about: There’s the crazy dude with the machete who hacks his ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend’s head off and mounts it to his car and waits for the police to show up; and my neighbor’s lawn mower getting stolen out of his garage.
One of those you’ll find in the pages of the newspaper, guaranteed, the other is the opposite: you’ll never, ever, in a million years read about my neighbor’s lawn mower getting stolen out of his garage in the pages of the St. Petersburg Times.”
Only 28% of the audience of an average news program, website or magazine gets valuable information about products and services advertised there, making news venues less effective at conveying ad messages than all forms of media combined, according to consumer research from Experian Simmons.
Among the TV and magazine news properties evaluated, Experian Simmons found that the most talked about news property is The Drudge Report, followed by The New York Times, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, The O’Reilly Factor and The Wall Street Journal.
It’s a given that printed newspapers attract an older audience. But what about newspaper websites? How do the demographics match up? I use Quantcast to find out. I cannot speak on what level of accuracy this data portrays, but here it is. Caveat Emptor.
We can’t always work right? I headed into NYC to see Wintuk at the WaMu theater near madison square garden. Nice venue, we get there and some older lady is in our seat. She won’t move, the show is starting so they move us up to the 6th row!!! Awsome! Thanks old lady!
The show starts slow, but when the puppeteers come out with the monsters and the HUGE birds, and dogs… Those were amazing. At the very end we got snow (blue and white paper) blown at us from the cieling. It was really cool.
To end the night we went over to the paker meridian hotel 118 W57 street to the burger joint. If you don’t know about this place… you just found out. The best burgers in new york city without a doubt. Then a quick look at the tree in rockafella center, yep there it is, and then we went home. I’m going to sleep now.
In the unlikely scenario that every single printed news source in the entire world went out of business: Where will I learn that OJ Simpson was just convicted?
Lauren’s article: Sure, Newspapers Could Just Die A Painful Death; But Here’s Another Option appears on washingtonpost.com. She proposes the old idea of turning a for-profit newspaper into a non-profit news organization. There are some fundamental problems with this, the least of which is that by definition:
“…the objective [of a non-profit] is to support or engage in activities of public or private interest without any commercial or monetary profit.”
With that in mind, the current owners and stakeholders would never get their money back. MNI is in the hole for $1.9Billion plus another few billion in lost market capitalization. Sam Zell is personally in the hole for $8.5Billion on his purchase of Tribune. His personal “investment”.
This sentence, “While converting to a not-for-profit won’t improve the financials…” is where the non-profit option fails for companies already drowning in debt.
So Robots Can’t Do Everything After All -from Gigaom “Well, well, well — maybe there’s a place for human beings in the new media landscape after all” Human editor needed
Regarding this post and his comments, Robert Ivan conducted an email interview to let John Yemma state his case.
RI: We seek to interview any person or company doing innovative things in new media or traditional media. We prize innovation here at metaprinter and encourage media organizations to come on and trumpet their achievements. The goal of the interview is to find out a little bit more information than what can be found already online or in print.
JY: Excellent idea. And good for you for seeking that information via interview.
John, my intention with the very first post was commentary and analysis of the video interview. I am sorry it displeased you so much. I found that video through Google while researching information regarding newspaper business models. As I said in that post, I admire your consideration in utilizing diverse revenue streams, but I am concerned that they are unsustainable because they rely on:
JY: Robert, it only displeased me because it didn’t seek answers to specific questions. In that video that you cite, Len Witt was asking specific questions to which I was giving specific answers. It isn’t logical to expect that all of your questions would be answered by my answers to Len. At any rate, we’re past that now since you’re asking specific questions and I’m responding below. Peace.
Wikipedia gets $890,000 for the Luddites -from Cnet If they make it more user friendly, I could totaly see wikipedia becoming the next big thing for newspapers to develop into “local focus” websites.
Who needs newsprint when we have the Internet? -from Inlandpress.org “The site is still focused on building audience, in the hope that it will be profitable in the future.” I still cannot find an economically viable online newspaper that does journalism. Help me.
StateStats is hours of fun. It tracks the popularity of Google searches per state and then correlates the results to a variety of metrics. -from Kottke.org
In October 2008, citing losses of $18.9 million per year versus $12.5 million in annual revenue, the Monitor announced that it would cease printing daily and instead print weekly editions starting in April 2009.
CSM editor John Yemma tries to convince himself that the organization can become economically sustainable.
He claims that a pure online CSM would cost 6 to 7 Million dollars a year to operate. With their weekly print product, approximately $12 Million. He hopes to generate revenue to cover those costs through a mix of reader subscriptions, money generated from a 30 year old CSM endowment that outputs about $7 million a year. A syndication service which generates approximately $600,000, and donations from church coffers which equal about $5 million a year. He doesn’t give an advertising revenue number because the number is so low.
The answer he gives to the question, “why would I pay $89 for something that’s free online” doesn’t inspire confidence. He says, “Its a nice product. it’s a nice weekend read. It has a smaller carbon footprint.” what!?
And from the New York Times “The site now gets about three million page views a month, according to comScore, and Mr. Yemma said he wanted to increase that to 20 million to 30 million a month in the next five years. Even if he can fill the site only with remnant, cheap ads, he said, if visits grow as he is projecting, ‘that’s a sustainable model.’” According to Quantcast the site gets more like 2million page views per month so again, how is CSM expecting to grow online readership 10 to 15x in the next 5 years? And what does he consider a “cheap” ad? CPC display Ad rates are falling fast.
Although I commend his utilization of multiple revenue streams, This is NOT an economically sustainable model. He hopes his model will break even in 5 years. He hopes (based on what?) that readership grows from currently 50k to 90k readers at which point they should break even. How is he going to grow readership when it has been declining from a high of 220,000 in 1970? All I’m hearing is, “use church money and endowment injections and hope at some point that additional revenue shows up”.
UPDATE:
In the follow up interview we make nice and share our ideas Round 2
