The death-by-installment-plan decline of America's newspaper industry may have finally gone from grave sickness to life support.
The priests haven't been called in yet to give the last rites, but one bit of news Monday certainly led many to draw the curtains and light the candles: the Boston Globe's largest union's rejection of $10 million in proposed benefit and wage cuts that owners the New York Times Co. insisted the ailing paper needs to survive.
And it didn't stop there. The almost immediate response by the Times was to slash the pay of the Boston Newspaper Guild members by 23 percent, effective next week. And that caused such a rumble that the Times was forced to issue a statement Tuesday saying it had no intention of closing the Globe.
That lasted until Wednesday, when it was reported in the Globe itself that Times had hired Goldman Sachs to help facilitate possible bids and a sale of the paper. Ouch!
What's an ailing industry to do?
Author, screenwriter and McSweeney’s publisher Dave Eggers made a lot of noise recently proclaiming that he was going to “rework” newspapers and rediscover readers by adopting an approach that “luxuriates in the beauties of print."
It’s a nice idea, and if anyone can pull it off, maybe it’s Eggers, but as any graphics department head at any newspapers will tell you, there are only so many redesigns you can do to dress up the walking wounded.
TheWrap has five other thoughts.
Following, five potential storming-of-the-beaches solutions for an industry badly in need of a financial D-Day:
1. ONLINE ONLY
It's not just the future, but the present of newspapers. The Christian Science Monitor went exclusively online, having lost more than $50 million in 2008. The Hearst Corporation closed down the print version of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in March and turned it into a much leaner online product. This spring, the Detroit Free Press severely limited its home delivery and trimmed the newsstand version to just over 30 pages.
As too many journalists will tell you, an online only product also means more of them would join the over 20,000 scribes who've lost their jobs in the past two years. And, indeed, at the papers that have shed their newsprint versions, they have also shed a good number of staffers -- naturally limiting what the paper can cover.
But, in many ways, going online-only makes good sense: It certainly saves on distribution and printing costs...not to mention all those trees.
The other bonus: An online news organization can not only report and respond to what's going on immediately -- and then fill in the blanks as more and more information is revealed -- but it can offer context, relevant links and other media to augment a story.
2. PAYWALLS
The cliché that "you get what you pay for" holds a lot of weight with some media managers -- or at least they'd like to convince readers of that.
A few years ago, a number of publications had paywalls -- or online subscriptions: If you want to read the content, you have to cough up either a monthly or yearly rate.
