On his excellent blog Out with a bang,Addiply's Rick Waghorn argues against the proposition that moves should be made to help the three PLCs, Johnston Press and Trinity Mirror in this country,and Gannett(parent company of Newsquest) in the US,to have an orderly default on their debts.
According to Rick,
I think RBS will bleed JP to death cash-wise, before picking over the dead carcass of a once-great newspaper group in the hope of find anything of worth left to flog. The impact on the lives of anyone still left in the bowels of those buildings will be of no concern whatsoever to those that call the shots from on high.
Meanwhile at the New York Times,David Carr writes that last week, John Paton,of MediaNews met with executives of the MediaNews Group, the second-largest newspaper chain by circulation in the country and told them that they should be outsourcing most operations other than sales and editorial, focusing on the cost side that might include further layoffs, stressing digital sales over print sales with incentives, and using relationships with the community to provide some of the content in their newspapers.
Mr. Paton has heard all about how choosing digital revenue over print revenue is like choosing dimes over dollars. He points out that the print dollars have dropped by more than half in the last five years and perhaps it is time to start “stacking the dimes.” He also notoriously proposed that real transformation would happen only if the industry were willing to “stop listening to newspaper people.”
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