Or – “Harvesting a market position”:
Jay Rosen: Laying The Newspaper Gently Down to Die:

The Project for Excellence in Journalism, in its invaluable report on the state of the news media today, puts it this way: “If older media sectors focus on profit-taking and stock price, they may do so at the expense of building the new technologies that are vital to the future. There are signs that that may be occurring.”

Newspapers in 2004, for instance, increased their profits at double the rate (8%) that their revenues grew (less than 4%), according to the Newspaper Association of America, a distinct sign of profit-taking. The industry remains highly profitable. Margins averaged 22.9% in 2004, according to the analyst Lauren Fine, and are expected to rise in 2005. The investment in online publications, though, where the size of the profits is still fairly modest, remains by most evidence cautious.

Perhaps this local example is related?

Michael Malone:

In any other industry, a product that lost 1 percent of market share for two decades — only to then double or triple that rate of decline — would be declared dead. The manufacturer would discontinue it and rush out a replacement product more in line with the desires of the marketplace. So, let’s finally come out and say: Newspapers are dead. They will never come back. By the end of this decade, the newspaper industry will suffer the same death rate — 90-plus percent — that every other industry experiences when run over by a technology revolution.

The transition will surely be interesting….

Bill Novak:

Community activists upset with the Wisconsin State Journal for including a seat on an advisory panel with a $25,000 sponsorship package for a new business journal took their protest to the newspaper offices this morning.

State Journal Publisher Jim Hopson and Editor Ellen Foley met with a half-dozen activists from nonprofit organizations. Both emphatically denied that access to the State Journal is for sale.

“We do not sell access to the State Journal,” Hopson said. “We give it away freely.”

Interesting to see this surface in the State Journal’s sister publication, the Capital Times. Both own and operate Capital Newspapers, a joint operating company where its monopoly is protected by the Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970. Background on the 1970 Act: Clusty. Somewhat related, Jay Rosen is calling for the de-certification of the press. The Economist (paid link) also jumps in:

Behind all this lies a shift in the balance of power in the news business. Power is moving away from old-fashioned networks and newspapers; it is swinging towards, on the one hand, smaller news providers (in the case of blogs, towards individuals) and, on the other, to the institutions of government, which have got into the business of providing news more or less directly. Eventually, perhaps, the new world of blogs will provide as much public scrutiny as newspapers and broadcasters once did. But for the moment the shifting balance of power is helping the government behemoth.

Frank Ahrens takes a look at the plight of daily newspapers in the internet era (Here’s a great chart on the changes):

Frank A. Blethen, publisher of the Seattle Times, said his industry has some breathing room left. But not much.

“The baby boomers are going to continue to drive print [sales] for some time,” he said. “The problem we have are the . . . 18- to 35-year-olds. They’re not replacing the baby boomers.”

Others are more blunt, if hyperbolic.

“Print is dead,” Sports Illustrated President John Squires told a room full of newspaper and magazine circulation executives at a conference in Toronto in November. His advice? “Get over it,” meaning publishers should stop trying to save their ink-on-paper product and focus on electronic delivery of their journalism.

I believe the changes in the newspaper industry mirror Kodak’s plight: the sharp, ongoing drop in formerly very high margin film sales. People are still taking pictures, in fact, more than ever. Kodak is just not capturing the kind of dollars they did in the past.

Newspapers face a similar issue. Their high margin, very high overhead business model will likely not survive (this will take some time), BUT citizens still want information, in fact, due to the internet, we’re foraging for information at much higher rates than before.

I also think newspapers have not adjusted to their reader’s changing expectations regarding news accessibility, depth and content in the internet era. The traditional text article, designed for print no longer cuts it. Thus the rise of the blogs….

Watch the conversation (technorati).