R.I.P. Delivery Business

 

 

Sometimes you can have a very good business without really understanding what business you’re in. Just ask a daily newspaper – and hurry while you can still talk to one without a séance or a Ouija board.

 

Newspapers long trumpeted that they were in the News Business. In the last few decades, that changed to the Media Business or Communications Business, but those two were really just the News Business with a college degree and a daily clean shirt.

 

And now that newspapers find themselves flopping in the muck at the bottom of a rapidly draining pond, they’re using their last gill-gasps to wonder what happened to the News Business.

 

Which is odd, because they mostly had much less to do with news than they did with delivering it. Then again, a fedora with a “Delivery” card tucked into its brim doesn’t have quite the cachet of one that says “Press.”

 

What newspapers were delivering was events that happened outside the immediate range of most folks, but interested them nonetheless. You didn’t need a newspaper to tell you your teenage daughter was gaga over that lowlife down the street or other really important stuff. Instead they delivered news that Senator Windbag’s bill to tax public flatulence had been tooted out of Congress, or that the Red Sox had laundered  the White Sox.

 

The hunter-gatherers who found and processed these events, the reporters and editors, developed an endless capacity for self inflation, but the whole process depended on delivery, not discovery. No matter how penetrating your insight, how soaring your prose, how stunning your revelation, it was for zilch unless an awful lot of folk wrestling heavy machinery, driving fleets of trucks and hauling bundled newspapers in bags or little red wagons did their stuff.

 

That was the service that the most valuable subscribers signed up for – home delivery.

 

It was the home delivery subscriber that advertising salesfolk peddled to advertisers, convincing them to make the never-quite-proven assumption that all these folk (a.) read the paper daily and (b.) would read their ad if they did. Newsstand sales counted, sure, but kind of like a walk down the aisle after the third kid – acknowledged, but not really celebrated.

 

And the subscribers stuck around because they had no real alternative, especially in the one-newspaper towns that came to be the norm.. Although broadcast news was handy and multimedia, it was usually constrained to a predetermined time slot and a predetermined length. Nothing else delivered content in a way that subscribers could use pretty much any way they wanted any time they wanted, at least within the confines of an hours-long publishing and delivery cycle. And within the limits of content discovered and selected by the reporter and editors.

 

That setup drove profit margins that were so obscene they were seldom discussed in public, attention instead being lavished on the reporters and editors, who liked hearing how important they were so much they were willing to ignore generally crummy pay and worse hours. Like parakeets before mirrors, they were in love and nothing else mattered.

 

Then came the telecommunications revolution. Events still happened and folks were still interested in them, but they didn’t need a report delivered via truck or underpaid kid. They could go online and get it whenever they wanted.

 

In fact, they didn’t even need the reporter/editor hunter/gatherer crowd as much, since just about anyone near an event could capture and post it for anyone else to see.

 

That’s over-simplified, but the subscribers lost interest in getting filtered information gathered and delivered via presses and trucks and under-tipped kids and stopped paying for them all. Maybe not all at once, but a website called “Newspaper Death Watch” being pretty busy these days is a solid clue about a trend.

 

If any of the folks in the delivery business survive, it will be the ones who finally figure out what business they were in, notice that it doesn’t have much of a pulse, and find or start a new business.

 

And they don’t have much time.

 

 

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