it’s nice to know that other media companies besides newspapers have been getting hammered by the relentless pace of change.
In truth, I already knew this. Viewers are spending more time online, and advertisers tend to follow them. And the so-called “legacy media” companies, which I hope includes small-town operations like this one, have taken large hits to their revenue despite being online themselves.
All this was apparent in a story on The Washington Post website (naturally, a website) that said ESPN is finally ready to begin its own streaming service. Its live sports broadcasts and other programs, till now mostly restricted to cable TV, can soon be seen online for $30 a month.
The story included sentence gems like these:
• “The new direct-to-consumer product ... represents the latest evidence of the chaos that cord-cutting has wrought on the media industry.” I feel that pain.
• “Since 2013, ESPN has lost some 40 million cable subscribers.” Yep, I feel that one, too. When I started work here a million years ago, in 1983, we sold about 12,000 papers per edition. Today we sell about 2,900 — and we print only two days a week instead of six.
• “It took so many years to get here because the cable ecosystem was too valuable to cannibalize. Even diminished, it continues to be lucrative.” Like ESPN on cable, most of the Enterprise-Journal’s money still comes from print.
For the past three months, ESPN took in $4.3 billion in revenue. The Enterprise-Journal’s revenue was a bit less than that, but also was a lot less than it used to be.
ESPN is doing the right thing by going online and keeping cable. They are serving two audiences, just like the Enterprise-Journal is trying to do with its website.
Nobody should worry about ESPN’s future. The Walt Disney Co. owns it. Disney knows how to make money.
But reading the story about ESPN’s big move reminded me that it’s probably time to give you an update on how things are going since we reduced our print frequency in June.
In all honesty, it’s been a little bit better than I expected. About 125 subscribers have stopped taking the paper, perhaps unhappy about getting it only twice a week, or believing that subscription prices should have been reduced more than they were.
We extended the subscriptions those that expired in June or later. More will expire in the coming months, and some won’t renew. I hope the decline remains manageable.
The cutback has made all of us realize how our business has to change. For the last 25 years, we’ve been a newspaper with a website. But now we can get the news out much more quickly online than we ever could in print, so we have to learn to be a website with a newspaper.
This is not a knock on the paper, which I love. It’s what the numbers are saying.
When there is a huge local story, like when the police officer got killed, our website gets plenty of extra traffic even though stories like that require a subscription to read.
Local stories of great interest often get looked at by two, three or four times the number of print subscribers.
Since we only have a paper twice a week, most stories will not occur near our print deadlines. So you’ll see them on the website first. This can include “breaking news,” of which we’ve had plenty lately, along with reports from local board meetings, sports events and obituaries.
The true challenge will be converting some of these occasional website visitors into paying subscribers. We have a ways to go in that department, I suspect partly because lots of people seem to think that everything on the internet should be free.
Here’s a story that makes me think we’ll be OK.
My son John, the future airline pilot, works evenings at Wal-Mart to bring in a little cash. Last Thursday night, he overheard co-workers talking about an unexpected local death, and one woman said, “I’ll check the Enterprise. They usually have something.”
In fact, Matt Williamson did indeed have a story on the website Thursday night about it. So stick with us. We’re still reporting the local news.
