Amputation is Not the Answer

Here’s my big thoughtful piece for the week – you can’t cut you’re way out of a hole, that only makes the hole deeper or wider. You have to build your way out of it.

As readership declined and advertising disappeared, so many news organizations started slicing away to make the bottom line palatable for the investors. It didn’t work. And anyone who understood the issues of behind the slide of journalism (which would be, I think, the journalists in the newsroom) could have told them that amputation was not the answer.

Charles Apple linked to a blog post by the John Paton from the Journal Register and MediaNews where he explains that the MediaNews Group is going to take 25 journalists, give them state of the art equipment, time and compensation to figure out the tools and how to make them work in a newsroom.

Is this the sign of hope we’ve been looking for?