James Moroney, publisher and chief executive of the Dallas Morning News and executive vice-president of the Belo Corporation, opened the ninth International Online Journalism Symposium in April 2008 with a blunt framing: making the hard-copy paper last long enough to complete the transition into digital, in a way that still supports journalism. He called it the most transformational period in the history of the US newspaper industry, running from 2002 to 2012.
His central distinction was between two businesses. “If you are in the newspaper business, you are in the business of managing decline. If you are in the news and information business, then you have a healthy future.” A newspaper, on his account, was only a way of packaging news and information, and he pressed a room of newspaper people on how hard they found that to say.
The short-term prescription was managerial: decide where margins will settle and manage to that number, shed unprofitable circulation, sell surplus printing and distribution capacity, raise prices where possible, lower advertising rates where necessary, outsource where it improves productivity. The long-term one was cultural — expect change, superserve local niche audiences, reorganise around local.
In Dallas that had meant foreign bureaus and several sections closed, circulation outside a 100-mile radius eliminated apart from Austin, and the savings put into granular local coverage — metro sections, weekly neighbourhood print titles carrying community content edited by professional journalists, and some 50 local micro-sites. Local papers, he argued, should own the niches they can cover better than anyone else, from high school sports to entertainment.