For those news organizations able to imagine life after COVID-19, long-term prospects are hampered by what Ken Doctor sees as a skills crisis.
Interview with Ken Doctor
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As the American economy shrinks under lockdown limitations imposed to halt the coronavirus pandemic, ongoing enterprises are reduced to a handful – grocery markets, pharmacies, home supplies, and hardware stores. These businesses serve our basic needs of shelter and sustenance. What of those that feed our appetite for information? Are they not essential, too?
Factual local reporting is, indeed, “essential” in an age of fear and misinformation, asserts Ken Doctor, a leading news industry analyst and political columnist whose Newsonomics blog appears regularly for NeimanLab.
Yet the COVID-19 crisis that is driving readers and listeners and viewers back to substantive news sources, especially local news sources, could also be the proximate cause of death for much of the same industry, Doctor fears. While subscriptions and eyeballs may have soared to new levels, the prognosis for advertising is more frightful than ever.
“Those publishers that are most exposed to advertising have the most problem,” he tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally. “We can see this in the alternative press, these city weeklies that you see in most big cities. They have lost as much as 80% of their advertising when the daily newspapers have lost 30% to 50% going into April.
“And why 80%? Well, it’s because they are totally oriented to city life… and if that is suspended, their businesses are in worse shape. That is the essence of it: that advertising still drives more than half of the revenue of most daily newspaper companies.”
As the coronavirus pandemic deepens and lengthens, industry executives face existential questions. For example, a local newspaper may decide to cut its print run on certain days, a decision with little likelihood it would be later reversed.
For those news organizations able to imagine life after the crisis, though, long-term prospects are hampered by what Ken Doctor sees as a skills crisis.
“How do you create a product; how do you have good enough content; how do you have people who write for what I call, ‘skim and expand,’ so we can read briefly, and then read more deeply later; how do you have businesspeople who know how to do business intelligence and audience development?”
“These are all skills that are not new skills anymore in 2020,” he says. “They were new skills in 2010, but the people who have these skills – who tend to be somewhere in their 20s or their 30 — they don’t want to work for newspaper companies… and oftentimes newspapers can’t compete for them in terms of salary. So without the right people, without the right people, you can’t really turn this around.”
