golf and newspapers are for old people
Getting some beers and truly horrendous nachos with a few colleagues the week prior to last, the topic turned, as it often will among gatherings of like-minded corporate slaves, to the hotly debated industry issues de jour. In this instance: the collapse of newspapers.
Some background on this particular collapse may be needed to appreciate this post further so, without boring you too much, I can say that it is my official businessman opinion that newspapers are going out of business because they insist on spending more money writing and delivering newspapers than they end up making selling the ads that go inside them. Obviously this business model is a foolish one, but luckily my powers of free-association and eavesdropping enabled me to come up with a solution—don’t pay the writers. Voila! Fixed.
Let me backup. While we were discussing the imminent failure of The New York Times we were also discussing professional golf. It seems that wannabe professional golfers are compelled to compete for a “card” which entitles them to participate in officially sanctioned competitions and thusly become true professionals. However, until said card is secured, these fellows actually pay to travel to and participate in regional qualifying tournaments, apparently, at great expense to themselves. In this model, like with most professional sports, newcomers are so enthusiastic and passionate about their craft that the mere chance of later greatness (and money) is a tempting enough possibility that they pay into the pyramid scheme that keeps Tiger rolling in private jets and diamond-encrusted iPods.
So, perhaps my theory is now obvious. Newspapers must replicate this pay-to-play model and, through the Woodward and Bornstein worshiping eagerness of new J-school graduates, the industry can remake itself.
Also, let’s save a few trees and stop printing out pages and pages of stock quotes. Anyone with enough money to invest probably got a computer about twenty years ago.
