The beginning of the end
of print journalism happened on a cold day in Chicago in 1993. But wasn’t
a newspaper that died, it was an American tradition.
Among its many mistakes,
Sears stopped printing its catalog in ‘93. Just to point out that the
company made many bad moves before Eddie Lampert, the current owner was still
doing things he knows how to do instead of pretending to bring dead retailers
back to life.
The Sears catalog was a
precursor and early cautionary tale about all things printed. Now we read
about newspapers and magazines that are first slimming down and then bowing
out.
Victims of the internet.
Craigslist stole all the classified ads. Cable TV ads are cheap. Radio ads…
well -- they’re the print ads of broadcasting. Nothing much happening
there. Yahoo News, Google News, The Daily Beast, the Huffpost, Drudge,
Facebook and Twitter. All the bad guys who are undermining print.
But guess what?
There’s no conference call among electronic media types and no secret hiding
place where they all gather to screw the Daily Bugle, “family owned since 1863
and the voice of Bugle County, Montana.”
The reasons Sears is
failing have nothing to do with the internet and nothing directly to do with
newspapers. It comes from chronic incompetence. But killing the catalog didn’t help.
J.C. Penney’s, no
Einsteins either,” took a route to catalog oblivion that Sears could have
followed. They print a bunch of small ones instead of one giant one. And you have to ask for them if you want
one.
Instead, they put all
their eggs in the online basket. The eggs that weren’t broken were
rotten. They did it terribly. Now they do it better. But it’s too late.
Yes, the Daily
Treekiller of Egg Harbor NJ didn’t get the message. The great
investigative power of the Chicago Tribune, Sears’ hometown paper didn’t follow
up with the effects of de-catalog-ization, let alone inspect its own house at
the time.
Would there have been a
way to prevent the viral death spiral if newspapers and magazines paid
attention? Hard to tell.
Technology moves far faster than the rest of society. But the newspaper
industry had 26 years to wake up and try. And it didn’t.
The coal miners of yore
brought caged canaries down the shaft because if the birds lived, the miners
would and if the birds died, there was otherwise undetectable poisonous gas in
the air but with still enough time to escape.
I’m Wes Richards. My
opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Comments? Send ‘em here:
wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2019
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