Even the News’s own headline writers follow the herd in missing the story about A.H. Belo’s quarterly results. The headline is correct but wrong — that is, it’s wrong if a headline is supposed to convey the real news in a story.
The real news is this: Belo’s newspapers — after years of misreading the media revolution, after a year of a freefall in advertising revenue, and after a desperate bid to stay in business by slashing costs — have stabilized. They have come up with a publishing model that works.
Here’s Daniel Gross over on Slate.com on how the model works. The key, as I have been saying for three years, is this:
But newspapers aren’t continuing to spend money as if it’s 2003 and hoping that Craigslist will disappear. No, they’re planning for survival by slashing costs sharply, trying to boost online advertising, and, here’s the clincher, making people pay more for the product. Print media is now in the process (belated, in my opinion) of finding a second large, potentially more stable, revenue base in addition to ads: subscriptions. The New York Times and many other papers have increased the price of the paper at the newsstand and for home delivery. When you raise the price of a product, you’re likely to lose a portion of your customer base. And while no newspaper likes to shed readers, some of the shrinkage in circulation is by design. If raising subscription costs by 11 percent causes 10 percent of customers to flee, a newspaper will find that its circulation revenues are stable while it saves a lot of money by manufacturing a smaller number of newspapers.
