Robert Decherd Gives State Of the Media Report

The A.H. Belo CEO spoke to the Friday Club at the Fairmont today to a sizeable audience of journalists, investors, his major shareholder (hi, Brian, and thanks for the invitation), and retired people who like to attend luncheon meetings. Decherd was humble and humorous and, as usual, an excellent presenter, giving a very candid, pointed, and descriptive review of the state of the newspaper industry in general and the Dallas Morning News  in particular. Jason Philyaw, a reporter for The Bond Buyer, was scribbling notes at our table, so I asked him to file a report, which he was kind enough to do and which appears, annotated, after the jump. 

 

Despite the persistent jeers from the peanut gallery over the state of journalism in general [Jason is speaking figuratively here; nobody at the luncheon jeered], Decherd said journalism education is booming and he expects these kids “will figure out how the business model is going to work a lot quicker than us old vets.” (Yup)

 

People have become accustomed to receiving DMN (and other newspaper) content for free with the extremely easy access of the Internet, but the question remains “how are we going to make money from it?” (oh, I dunno, make people pay for it?)

 

  I am as perplexed as Decherd is about what to do about the paying problem. Maybe Jason has a solution. In which case, he is hired.

 

 And with the comments section the DMN site provides, many people feel more involved and feel like somewhat of an “owner” of the DMN because they’re able to participate in the news, according to Decherd. (when I asked Wick later what he thought of that he said “I hate comments!” I then told him I used to comment a lot on FrontBurner under my initials — ‘jrp’ — he  blinked twice and waved to someone across the room…)

 

 Two problems with this: (1) Dechered was not talking about comments. He was talking about the emotional connection people feel with their newspaper or with their local TV anchors. In fact, Decherd did not mention the word “comments” in the entirety of his speech.  However, I understand that someone who works for a publication called the Bond Buyer can misunderstand this point. Bond buyers, in my experience, are not notoriously emotional. (2) Jason’s memory fails him again in recounting our conversation. As the luncheon ended, I reintroduced myself — we had shaken hands when I sat at the table — and Jason said he used to comment on our site. I then replied, “I hate comments”  and turned to my old friend Dan Petty who had come up to say hello. But two versions are to be expected, I suppose. Everyone is the hero of his own story.

 

 Decherd went on to say a lot of emotion gets involved in the comments and sometimes things get carried away. This is evident to me when reading a DMN story online about Jenny the Elephant and seeing people debating immigration and welfare in the comments section. (Stupid trolls, ruining it for the rest of us.) 

 

Decherd said nothing of the sort. He did say that people love or hate the printed newspaper on any particular day. I don’t know where Jason came up with this comment stuff. Again, Decherd never once mentioned the word “comments.”

 

 He said the not-for-profit model is a “swell idea…but it doesn’t work” as you’re “just not going to reach the same audience as the print-on-paper model.” (no argument there)

 

Decherd gave quite a concise teardown of the Texas Tribune model, without mentioning it by name. He major point was that only a for-profit business that becomes institutionalized is capable of sticking with a mission over a long period of time. A non-proft depends on its donors, all of whom have different agendas and all of whose agendas change over time.

 

 He said the DMN is continuing to focus on its core readers by narrowing its circulation footprint because advertisers don’t care what the paper’s circ numbers are for Tulsa, Amarillo etc.

 

Decherd also said that the News is shedding readers rapidly and deliberately, as we will see in Septemer — which I took to be a reference to the Audit Burea report. He also said the enormous recent subscription price increases, which he earlier made a very funny joke about, were not costing as many renewals  as their models had predicted, which is a good sign for the survival of the newspaper as a medium.

 

 He said newspaper publishers are projecting advertising revenue declines of 30% for 2009 on top of drops of 15% to 25% in 2008. (zoiks)  “You simply can’t take costs out fast enough to make up for that much decline in revenue,” he said.  According to Decherd, A.H. Belo Corp.’s total revenue for 2009 ] will be about $450 million to $500 million. In 2000, the DMN alone had almost that much revenue, including about $100 million from classified-employment advertising. This year that figure is closer to $10 million, according to Decherd. (stupid craigslist)

 He continually pointed to the Internet as the source of the problem. (uh, yeah) 

 

 Jason and I seemed to take this two different ways. I thought it was a fairly precise and dispassionate account of the state of the media world for those in the audience not intimately aware of its problems. Jason seems to think Decherd is dim-witted. Let me assure him that  Robert Decherd is not dim-witted.

 

 “We have to receive fair value for our content,” he said. Adding that putting up a wall and making people pay for content they’ve gotten so used to getting for free is a “tightrope…and everybody in the industry already missed the boat on that one.” At which point I turned to the WSJ editor to my right and said “not the Journal.” He nodded in apparent agreement. One take on the Journal’s subscription model: http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2009/03/case-for-charging-to-read-wsjcom.html 

 

 Decherd was making a larger point here about the web that Jason seems to have either missed or not understood. Decherd said that as a commercial vehicle the web works primarily on a transactional level, and that the legacy media missed the boat in understanding its nature and taking advantage of the transactionally based opportunities it provides. Twice in the speech he referred to failed transactions Belo had tried — he didn’t use the word CueCat — but it was not done defensively. Failures are part of innovation, he said, and he’s right. He then talked about the recent acquisition of Sawbuck as a way for Belo to leverage its audience in real estate transactons. This is the only time I pulled out my new IPhone — love it! — and made a notation to myself. The “WSJ editor” mentioned by Jason is a writer for the Journal’s editorial page.

 

 So there’s the notes. Sloppy yeah, but hey, man, I have a paying job that demands my attention as much as  FrontBurner used to…

 later

-jrp

 

That last was a little dig at me for taking comments off FB.  If you haven’t noticed, Jason has a thing about comments  Thank you, Jason, for being a volunteer reporter. FrontBurner Nation, please give Jason a round of applause.