I keep saying it, guys:

1) On the print business overall: “My biggest problem is the ‘death of print’ doom and gloom talk, which scares advertisers into thinking no one will see their ads. But as long as people keep picking up our paper, which they do, the ads get seen.”

Why yes. When you go around with your hair on fire screaming EVERYTHING IS HORRIBLE AND WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE people treat you like you have cooties and they don’t want to buy your shit. Advertisers read the trades, too, so if you spend all your time talking about how your product is doomed, it’s not, shall we say, more attractive to them.

The rest of the piece, about a newspaper whose print circ is growing and growing, is interesting in that it reinforces the very simple idea that if you set out to do something in business you shouldn’t blow at it. You shouldn’t run syndicated crap nobody cares about and you shouldn’t yell at the kids to get off your lawn and you shouldn’t stop selling ads because everything’s all over now, man, and nobody reads anymore. You should cover your community and do it well. Revolutionary. I hope it catches on.


4 thoughts on “JUST STOP SUCKING

  1. You’re probably too young to remember when TV was going to replace radio. And when Microfische was gonna replace print.

  2. Kind of tangential, but just read an article the other day where the new Head of Microsoft listed 5 things that they were going to have to do right.
    One of the items was to inform the public on the fact that a tablet is not a desktop or laptop.
    How many futurists have I listened to talking about how tablets were gonna kill off the laptops – all because they didn’t understand this.

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