Newspaper Death Watch: No help from above

A departing editor from the Boston Globe (he took a buyout) tells the local Alt-Weekly that, although he has high hopes for newspapers and journalism in the future, he just doesn’t think the current crop of managers has it in them:

The old business model’s broken, and it’s not coming back. Somehow or other, I believe there will be newspapers, and there will be journalists. But we have to figure out a new way to pay for it, and we haven’t figured that out–who’s going to pay what it takes to do excellent reporting and careful writing, and who’s going to buy it in what form when it’s done …. There’s a lot of innovation that’s going to go on. I just don’t think it’s going to be done by the management of papers as we now know them. I don’t think they have the imagination. I shouldn’t make a sweeping statement, but so far, what I see is just cutting and cutting and hoping some kind of miracle happens. I don’t mean that that’s the character of this company more than it is the character of any other. I just think that, for the most part, most newspaper management is in a state of shock. They’re not really going to be the ones to do it.

One of the commenters takes it even further, laying it on the Baby Boomers directly. Really rips into them, too:

Baby Boomer managers, and journalists … over the last 30 some years have had ALL the TIME in the world to innovate, and protect newspapers that are now about to go out of existance throughout this country (and others as well.)

Frankly, many aging boomers falsely believed that they were going to live forever, and did the best they could to keep their jobs over three decades, while at the same time, continuing to force younger reporters to skip from paper to paper, town to town, who’ve had to face the same “unimaginative” baby boomer executives, publishers, managing editors, and city editors, as well as having to deal with unresponsive boomer journalists who sought more to protect their careerist positions, rather than to innovate before it was too late.

Now, it is too late, and not only for baby boomers, who are lucky enough to even be offered “buyouts” rather than being laid off.

You can’t say that for the younger Generation X editors, reporters, etc., who now have NO newspaper to go to since the Baby Boomers, in their own greed and shortsightedness, have destroyed newspapers that lasted over 100 years.

Unimaginative? You bet.

It’s downright gruesome and sad to see one generation take down the entire newspaper industry and expect all of us to cry about the “good run” they had.

Great ride. But it’s the last ride for any other generation since younger generations cannot follow to even clean up the mess the Baby Boomer generations has left behind.

As for the newspapers ~ there won’t be any “mess” to clean up since papers are falling left and right ~ destroyed by the generation that once said never trust anyone over 30.

Great Job baby boomers.

Whether its fair to blame so-called “baby boomers” or not, I do think there’s a real fear in the upper echelons of the industry these days — and too many managers are afraid to take any chances. They just want to hold on until their pensions kick in. You can almost hear them chanting “Five more years, just five more years” with retirement so close they can smell it.

But, despite the anger that newspaper execs were asleep at the switch, I think there’s a burgeoning creativity online that bodes well. Newspaper inspire loyalty and love from people, and people really want to re-create their (former) success online. I have hope.