Transforming and thriving: why our most loyal customers want us to change

"What is going to happen to newspapers?" A group of friends asked this question as we attended a Shakespeare festival together. My friends would mostly qualify as senior citizens from a generation of newspaper readers. They included the chairman of the Board of Education, a retired municipal bonds expert and university professor, a stockbroker, a homemaker who now reads newspapers regularly since her children have left the nest, and others - all of whom have been newspaper readers for most of their lives. They asked me the question because I'm a former newspaper publisher and the CEO of a newspaper …

Cost cutting, wrist slitting or a new direction?

May 28, 2009 09:43AM by Don Oldham

Transforming the business model

It is clear that media companies need to reduce costs to cope with the drastic declines in advertising revenue. Worse yet I read about newspapers getting rid of all of their graphic designers, nearly eliminating their copy editors and telling the reporters to copy edit their own stories, and slashing their news staffs .

How can you cut out the most essential ingredients of quality news gathering and expect to have a product readers will still want?

I read about some companies deciding to modularize and standardize their editorial layouts, so they can use the same …

Audience-centric model driving newspaper transformation

As a former newspaper publisher, I can empathize when a newspaper's bad news is on their own front page. "Bankruptcy filings", "Revenues down", "Classifieds dying". Amid all the economic doom and gloom, the plight of newspapers seems to have a special ironic place in the news. When you go behind the headlines, too much debt from highly leveraged acquisitions is the root cause. Beyond the balance sheet, we have been slow as an industry to change business models and business processes to adapt to online opportunities.

Newspapers' process-centric approach is understandable. Producing a unique daily product requires a precisely choreographed …