Having watched a number of recessions during my journalism career one constant remained. Those journalists who most sucked up to the hierarchy, who served their owners, were insulated and isolated from the marketplace.
They became the journalism "profession" equivalent of tenured professors. They were pundits, with high salaries for the Washington cocktail circuit, and with no responsibility other than tell the rest of us what to think.
In 2009 those days are over. Suck on this, Maureen Dowd. You too, Tom Friedman (and your wife).
The ignorance and arrogance in Dowd's latest is stunning. Google gives traffic, and it even pays to host AP copy. It won't pay you to link to you. If anything you should be paying it. The market is a harsh place, and if it tells your business to suck on this, they suck.
The same is true locally. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is circling the drain, and throwing its old hands overboard. That just means opportunity for others. It means hyper-local sites like DecaturMetro have a shot — all they need to do is build a business model. (This is a map of Decatur, Georgia's WiFi system, courtesy the DecaturMetro blog. Note the comment on the link.)
Even ol' pirate Rupert Murdoch is threatened. His trying to "unify" news gathering at all his News Corp. properties is doomed from the start. Will MySpace traffic rise with Fox News crap all over it? Will The Times of London really take off if it's running stuff written for The New York Post? Please.
What is happening, simply, is that advertising is drying up. In all media, including this one. Victory goes to those who can best hunker down, whose business models let them keep costs down in tough times, and who have the most cash. Unfortunately the U.S. media industry has spent the last decade shedding cash. Moguls like Sam Zell bought properties with their own cash, piling up debt on them, expecting that squeezed costs and monopoly would guarantee profit.
Recessions are like forest fires. They clear out the underbrush, they kill the biggest trees, but they leave opportunity for new growth in their wake. Now is the right time to be a journalism entrepreneur. Share the risks and rewards with your writers, organize as well as advocate your community, your industry or your chosen lifestyle, let the doors slam as you work the advertisers in your target market, and you will be rewarded.
The next Rupert Murdoch may still be in college, but she's out there, and I'm sending her my resume.
