Don’t Get Distracted from the Existential Problem
In 1998 when I first began questioning if the Mass Media industries would have a future, the senior vice president of marketing at largest daily newspaper in Texas tried to reassure me, “People have been using newspapers for centuries, so we expect they will for centuries more.”
What immediately crossed my mind was that horses had been a prime means of transportation for millennia, so people living 100 years ago probably thought this meant that horses would still be a prime means of transportation in future centuries, too. How wrong they were! Within 30 years of 1898, horses had disappeared as a prime means of transportation in most developed nations. Not just in Texas!
Last week in this newsletter’s first edition, I stated that its focus is the existential threat now confronting the Mass Media industries as the Industrial Era wanes and the Informational Era dawns. What is this threat? Is it truly existential? Or am I being over-dramatic or otherwise hyperbolic? No, I can justify what I here state.
Twenty years ago, the Mass Media industries was riding high. Many of those industries announced recorded earnings during the first half-decade of the new millennium. Although the ‘Great Recession’ then struck, those industries reasonably expected to restore and resume those record earnings soon afterward. However, that didn’t happen.
Since 2007, almost all sectors of the Mass Media industries have seen plummeting audiences (i.e,. readership, listenership, or viewership); advertising clienteles; and gross revenues (turnover) when such numbers are adjusted for population growth or inflation. Some of the declines have been spectacular, an example of which I’ll describe below and in subsequent newsletters. Starting next week, I’ll likewise write about he categorical reasons for these declines.
However, in this second edition of the Digital Deliverance newsletters, let’s focus on the proximate reason why the Mass Media industries are not only in rapid decline but actually in danger of extinction, a tangible problem already creating troubling societal effects.
What is this existential threat? Some myopic pundits call it the ‘Missing Business Model’ problem.
During the past 30 years, literally billions of consumers worldwide have begun using personal computer-mediated technologies, rather than printed products or broadcast services, as their primary means of obtaining news, entertainment, and other information. Yet during that time, the Mass Media industries unfortunately haven’t been unable to devise a business model or models with these new technologies that enable them to earn revenues equal or greater than those they’d earned from the printed products or broadcast services which those billions of consumers are abandoning.
Simply naming this the ‘Missing Business Model’ problem is a misnomer that crudely allows too many ‘content creators’ to disclaim responsibility and claim that it is a problem for their business office to solve. In fact, it’s as much a Missing Product Model’ or ‘Missing Service Model’ problem. The printed products and broadcast services of the Mass Media industries had been phenomenally popular during the previous century but no longer are, no matter if now in print, broadcast, or online. So, it is more accurately a ‘Missing Business / Product / Services Model’ and has also begun causing societal problems.
The example I’ll use in explaining this is the U.S. newspaper industry. The newspaper sector of the Mass Media was the first to encounter personal computer-mediated technologies (as teletext or proprietary online services), thus it has had the most experiments and longest experiences with these new technologies. The United States of America is the world’s largest newspaper market.
If you ask journalists or news executives what the single greatest threat to journalism nowadays is, most will likely say either censorship or else the murders or imprisonments of journalists. They are wrong. Although censorship is rampant worldwide, it doesn’t exist in all nations of the world. As for murders or imprisonments, most journalism rights organizations report that 130 were killed and between 300 and 600 imprisoned last year. Yet as atrocious as those murders and imprisonments were and as restraining as censorship might be, the ‘Missing Business / Product / Services Model’ is manifestly causing even greater losses of journalism.
As proof, consider some arithmetic about journalism. According to the the Pew Research Center, more than more than 100,000 journalists in the U.S. became unemployed since 2008, primarily because the news enterprises for which they worked are shrinking due to falling revenues caused by the ‘Missing Business / Product / Services Model’ problem. If each of those 100,000 U.S. journalists had been reporting an average of between one and five stories per week, that probably means between 100,000 and half a million local, regional, national, or international news stories per week are no longer being reported. This means between 5 million to 25 million unreported stories during a typical American 50-week work year.
That’s just in U.S. Although I’ve not been able to locate an estimate for the global number of journalists who have become unemployed due to this problem, my educated guess is between 500,000 and 2 million. So, the number of news stories that aren’t reported due to the ‘Missing Business / Product / Services Model’ problem are magnitudes more than those unreported by the 130 journalists killed and 300 to 600 who were imprisoned.
That arithmetic also holds true for the Mass Media industries’ sectors creating and packaging contents that aren’t hard news, such as topical magazines and radio and video feature, etc. All topical media also are subjects of this problem.
So, you might think after 20 years of such declines that journalists are zealously trying to solve the ‘Missing Business / Product / Services Model’? Think again! A relatively small minority who’ve become unemployed have tried to start their own journalistic enterprises, reporting stories from their communities and posting those on websites they have created. Their successes among are few and far between. Some have been able to keep themselves fed and housed. Very few cases have been able to sustain employment for teams of journalists. (The Texas Tribune is often cited as a regional example, as are Semafor and Mediahuis as national or international examples.) None has found a model that is readily usable in all communities, such as the printed newspaper was during the 20th Century.
Most journalists, plus perhaps most people employed in the Mass Media industries, just want to continue what they have been doing. Many simply seem to assume that the theories, doctrines, business models, practices, and products and services that arose during the Industrial Era and have become known as the Mass Media are the ne plus ultra – the evolutionary ultimate in media (particularly now that multimedia ‘convergence’ has been added to and delivery is ‘digital’). That’s an unrealistic daydream shattered by billions of consumers having abandoned regular usage of the Mass Media industries’ products and services in printed, broadcast, or online. Yet many journalists and other content creators in the Mass Media industries refuse to believe the ‘Missing Business Model’ problem is in reality a ‘Missing Business / Product / Services Model’ problem in which the products or services they produce are crucially failing components.
Which brings me back to the subject of bogeymen. For instance, Amazon tycoon Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post. I’ve read dozens of news or media industry publications and websites that bewail Bezos’s ‘layoffs’ of one-third of his newspaper’s newsroom staff. According to them, when Bezos purchased that newspaper 13 years ago for US$250 million he was supposed to underwrite its losses forever. (I can locate no records of him ever having said so).
The Washington Post last year lost $100 million. As it did so during 2024. And it lost $70 million during 2023, and perhaps equal or smaller millions in previous years. The trajectory of its declines is no different from those of virtually all 1,100+ daily newspapers still published in the U.S. So, add all that to the $250 million Bezos paid in 2013 to purchase that newspaper. The Washington Post’s weekday printed circulation is now less than 97,000 and during the past three years its website’s ‘digital’ subscriptions dropped from 3 million to 2.5 million. Bezos has put more than a half billion dollars into keeping that newspaper operating. When is enough enough?
I know of a journalism professor who has written that the solution for the U.S. newspaper industry’s declines is for billionaires or multimillionaires to purchase each U.S. newspaper and operate these as a sort of charitable hobby. That too is a nice daydream. However, keeping dying patients alive via life support systems at charity hospitals doesn’t cure them. Likewise, the newspapers that plan to convert their legal status from commercial enterprises to not-for-profit organizations are simply swallowing a placebo.
Had those who blame Bezos as a bogeyman thought that he was a technological wizard who would devise devise some way to stop and reverse the newspaper industries’ declines in audiences, advertising clienteles, and revenues? Ditto biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong who in 2010 purchased the Los Angeles Times. Those wizards obviously were unable to do so. When in the 10th Century powerful King Canute went to the beach and commanded the tides to stop, did his courtiers and subjects condemn him when the tides continued? Bezos’s subsidization of The Washington Post likely kept that newspaper operating better and longer for the past 13 years that it otherwise might. (Ask the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, a newspaper even older than the District of Columbia itself, what the alternative is.)
For more than 20 years, remarkable number of Mass Media journalists and pundits have been blaming either bogeymen or cursory factors for their industries declines: feckless tycoons, hedge funds, corporate chain ownerships, dividend pressure from Wall Street, etc. In 2005, Columbia Journalism Review Publisher Evan Cornog even penned an tongue-in-cheek essay entitled Let’s Blame the Readers (an essay which suspiciously has since been removed from CJR’s online archive but is still available elsewhere). Let’s eliminate these bogeymen or cursory factors as the problem.
Compare the declines in audiences, advertising clientele, and gross revenues of the Mass Media companies owned by hedge funds, corporate chains, and publicly-held corporations versus those of the Mass Media companies that are independently or private owned or not-for-profit. You’ll see the declines are statistically the same regardless of those enterprises’ legal status or ownerships.
Look wider: the declines of Mass Media industries in Canada, 22 of the 27 European Union nations, Australia, Japan, Israel, Singapore, Malaysia, the Republic of South Africa, and many other developed nations remarkably parallel the declines of such industries in the U.S.
Another common false excuse for the Mass Media industries inability to devise a viable business model online says that consumers online have became ‘used to’ or ‘habituated’ to not paying for news, entertainment, and other information back when websites were first developed. It says that if all websites back then had charged, there now would be no problem. Such claimants are ignorant. I’ve been working full-time at the Mass Media industries adaptation to online since 1993. I was personally involved in scores of attempts to get their consumers to pay for online content during the 1990s and subsequent decades. Lack of charging back then wasn’t the problem simply because there was no such lack.
Long overdue is the time for journalists and other creators of traditional Mass Media products and services to awake to the understanding that the reasons why billions of consumers worldwide have shifted their media consumption away from those traditional products or services (even those placed online) isn’t merely a business office problem. It is a massive problem arising from those products and services. It’s the obsolescence of those products and services. There is no business model that will ever again make these products and services viable. Journalists and other content producers need to stop blaming others, notably bogeymen, for that fundamental problem. Journalists and other content producers need to join with their business office staffs in solving the problem (don’t worry: neither journalistic objectivity nor creative control needs to be sullied or surrendered).
Starting in next week’s newsletter, I’ll explaining how to solve this fundamental and existential problem. I’ll do so by defining the solution and dimensions, which is how I’d taught it for the past 14 years to my total of 220 postgraduate students; presented it at forums such as the World Media Economics and Management conferences and the International Media Management Academics Association; and have published it in the Journal of Strategic Innovation and Sustainability. Until next week!
By the way, on the topic of journalists, if you’ve time on Monday, March 9, listen to Carlos Dada, Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the internationally acclaimefd Central American news website El Faro, who will deliver this year’s Memorial Lecture at Oxford University’s Reuters Institute. His subject is Journalism as Resistance.
And lest anyone might mistakenly think that I might not care about murdered or imprisoned journalists, know that my friend journalist Mzia Amaglobeli, co-founder and director of Batumelebi and Netgazeti, is in her second year of jail on trumped up charges in the Republic of Georgia. Meanwhile, my friend José Rubén Zamora Marroquín, founder of the Guatemalan newspapers Siglo Veintiuno in 1990, El Periódico in 1996, and Nuestro Diario in 1998, who was serving a six-year jail sentence on concocted charges, was released in 2024 after the verdict was overturned on appeal. He is awaiting a new retrial on those same charges. I was honored to meet Dada, Zamora, and Amaglobeli when I was consulting to the Media Investment Loan Fund which help fund their news organizations.
I also lament the death of my friend Marie Colvin with whom I worked at United Press International’s New York City news bureau during the 1980s. Later a foreign correspondent for The Sunday Times of London, Marie was personally targeted by Syrian Army artillery and killed in 2012 during the Battle of Homs . In 2025, a court in France issued an arrest warrant for former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and six other officials of his regime due to the attack that killed her.
Please do forward this newsletter to anyone whom it might interest, and my thanks for reading it!