IT DRILLDOWN
 
NEWSLETTERS
 

CIO.com updates, insights and advice on technology, management and your career.

 
 
 
LEADERSHIP
 
CIO Executive Programs
The Leader in Face-to-Face Education for Senior Executives

Offering regional and national programs, CIO (and CSO) events bring together some of the most respected names and thought leaders in information technology and security. Presented by CIOs and other senior level executives, these invitation-only programs offer timely topics and strong networking. Learn More »

 
CIO Executive Council
A Peer-Advisory Service and Professional Association for CIOs

Portfolio Management Maturity Model at Chevron - Presentation & Discussion

November 13, 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM ET (GMT-4)

The fundamental goal of the model is to help IT become a business partner and earn a seat at the table. Core to the model is to establish a five year IT strategic road map that is owned by the business. Presenter Janinne Franke is manager of strategy, planning & optimization at Chevron's corporate department & services. She will share processes and lessons learned from developing and implementing the model.

More / Register »

Learn more about the CIO Executive Council »



 
 
RESOURCE CENTER
 
 
 
SUBSCRIBE TO CIO
 
Are you involved in setting the direction for your company's IT budget or strategy?

Apply today for a FREE subscription to CIO Magazine!

 
 
 

Newspapers Struggle to Respond to Web Challenge

The newspaper business is bad and getting worse. The Web is stealing the industry's readers, advertisers, revenues and even its enthusiasm for the business. But as newspapers struggle to respond, lessons for other industries confronting disruptive technologies are emerging.

 

April 05, 2007CIO

A clear, crisp winter morning in the South End of Boston. Beneath an overpass, at the crossroads of two of the city’s main highways, yellow-and-blue delivery trucks line the parking lot of The Boston Herald, the nation’s 43rd-largest newspaper, with a daily circulation of approximately 230,000 (150,000 on Sundays). Once a part of the Hearst publishing empire, the struggling paper was sold in 1982 to Rupert Murdoch’s News America Corp. for a mere $1 million. Murdoch promptly laid off nearly 200 employees and offered others buyouts. The media mogul introduced computers and Australian editors to the newsroom, and the paper offered prizes and giveaways to attract readers. In 1994, with the tabloid still struggling, Murdoch sold it to its publisher, Patrick J. Purcell, for between $15 million and $20 million. Today, inside the cluttered Herald newsroom, reporters and editors peck away at keyboards amid the crackle of police scanners. The carpeting is stained and threadbare, wires hang pendulously from the ceiling. The room is dotted with empty desks, in large part because the paper has laid off at least 25 percent of its writers and editors over the past couple of years. Memos, including an aging photocopy of how to properly fill out a time slip, are taped to pillars running down the middle of the room. Dismal as it may seem to an outsider, the scene is nothing new to the Herald, a paper that for years has run a distant second to its crosstown rival, the New York Times–owned Boston Globe, with its daily circulation of 414,000 (670,000 on Sundays).

But it doesn’t take a visit to the Herald’s run-down newsroom to understand how badly the newspaper industry has fared in recent years. Across the industry, ad revenue­, which is how newspapers make most of their money, grew by less than 3 percent in 2005 before flatlining in 2006, according to this year’s “State of the News Media” report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. The Newspaper Association of America reported this past fall that circulation for the some 770 dailies in the United States dropped 2.8 percent in 2006. On Wall Street, newspaper companies took a pummeling, with stock prices typically falling by an average of 14 percent. In desperation, many newspapers have begun to merge with, or acquire, their competitors in an attempt to gain market share and leverage economies of scale. In March 2006, Knight Ridder, then America’s second-largest newspaper publisher behind Gannett, was bought by a smaller outfit, McClatchy. In New York, former General Electric CEO Jack Welch and some investors offered to purchase the Globe from the Times for between $500 million and $600 million. The Times, which had bought the previously family-owned Globe for $1.1 billion in 1993, rejected the offer. But just a few months later, in January 2007, the Times turned around and devalued the Globe and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette (another Times property) by more than $800 million.

Loading...
 
 
ABCs
 

Just the basics, please. Sometimes we all need a refresher or we need to make sure our team and our colleagues are all on the same page.

Over 25 tutorials on everything from business intelligence to virtualization.

 
 
FEATURED SPONSORS
 
 
 
SPONSORED LINKS
 

Grassroots Data Governance with SAP MDM

Data Loss Prevention: Keeping Sensitive Data Out of the Wrong Hands

A Guide to Understanding Hosted and Managed Messaging

Google Apps Premier Edition Helps Indoff Manage E-mail More Effectively

CapGemini Cut Call Center Costs with Google Apps Premier Edition

Comprehensive Review of Security and Vulnerability Protections for Google Apps

Web 2.0 The New Face of the Web

Discover IBM Rational Application Solutions in this eKit

Determine the ROI of Web Application Acceleration Managed Services

"Enterprise-Proven" is the Prerequisite for Enterprise SaaS Portal Solutions

A New Model of Business Intelligence

Forrester Total Economic Impact (TEI) report: Save Millions in Fraud Losses.

Protecting Data in a Highly Networked World

Renowned Engineering Institution Chooses AMD Processor-Based Servers

BlackBerry Solution Increases Customer Service For Corporate Real Estate Company

Making Adaptive Networks a Reality

Rolling the dice with your security? Take the Self-Assessment Test now

Keep proven data center technology. Evolve with Brocade

Motorola AirDefense can identify and exterminate your rogue APs. Learn more

CA's IT Security centralizes your identity management to turn security into a proactive, business-building tool

Efficient - Flexible - Compliant

Is there a secret to Sharepoint® Security? www.SharePointSecured.com

Request a Novell/Microsoft deployment workshop

Keep your valued customers through tight business integration - it's a lot easier than you think

Simplified business collaboration, we make the connections so you don't have to

Information Security: Data Drains and How to Prevent Loss

Best Practices in Choosing and Consuming Managed Security Services

A Guide to Messaging Archiving

2008 Google Communications Intelligence Report

The Impact of Messaging and Web Threats

Comparing Google and Other Leading Messaging Security Solutions

Mission Impossible: Building the Right Project Metrics

Information Agenda - An innovative approach to transforming business information

Improve Web-Enabled SAP Performance

Live Webcast - Ensuring Business Services Delivery

The Case for Business Software Assurance ~ Securing Your Applications

Document Management 2.0 -- Web-based Collaboration and the Road to Compliance

Efficient by design: Watch this flash demo of the Quad-Core AMD Opteron Processor

HP and Oracle deploy unbreakable computing infrastructure at Replacements, Ltd.

Heinz Uses a Wireless, Automated, Auditing process on BlackBerry® devices

Network Immunity Manager Video

The Future is Fusion. Only from AMD. Learn more

Industry Analyst Report: Top Hosted Exchange Vendors in 2008

Log onto Hitachi True Stories, films inspired by the next great achievement

CA delivers deeper insight into your assets, resources, projects & services so you can make more informed IT decisions

Manage your IT more effectively

Request a Novell/Microsoft deployment workshop and kit

Request a Novell/Microsoft deployment kit

Let Hubspan's managed service tackle your business integration challenge so you can focus on your core business

Strong Authentication. Secure USB data storage. One Device