A research article published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science last June 19 by scientists Gerardo Ceballos, Paul R. Ehrlich, Anthony D. Barnosky, Andrés García, Robert M. Pringle and Todd M. Palmer from Stanford, Princeton and Berkeley universities in the United States suggests that the world has begun a sixth extinction-level event, this one driven primarily by humankind. Mind you Ehrlich’s 1968 best-seller, The Population Bomb, should have had us pretty much extinct by now anyway, had it come to pass, so who knows?
Meanwhile, as scientists pronounce on the likelihood of a sixth mass extinction for the Earth – to wit, the Holocene extinction, advertisers and readers are delivering a similar message, or so it seems, to what’s left of the incredibly shrinking mass media manufacturers, which are in some ways today’s equivalent to yesterday’s buggy whip, typewriter and video store retailers. Blockbuster, we hardly knew you.
As for so-called “digital disruption,” well, it’s not just digital disrupting the heirs of Gutenberg these days, and it’s no longer just a disruption. Can you say ad blockers and mobile platform-of-the day?
Back around the dawn of the 21st century, when newspapers still had a few new millennium choices or even just good bets that might have ensured their survival on some sizeable scale, there was talk about the theory of disruptive innovation invented by Clayton Christensen, of Harvard Business School.
The “innovator’s dilemma” for print media newspapers was the difficult choice they faced sometime between the mid-1990s and the 2000 Millennium (it really was in retrospect, with the benefit now of uncorrected 20/20 hindsight, a much narrower window of about five years, give or take, than publishers realized before they were left behind forever) in choosing between trying to hold onto readers in their existing market by doing the same thing a bit better (the Glacier Media-owned Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News, for instance, went online with the same content only slightly repackaged from their print editions in June 2009, about a dozen or more years after most larger Canadian daily newspapers did pretty much the same thing) or capturing new markets by embracing and adapting to new technologies and adopting new business models.
Where are we today, 16 years post-millennium?
Consider these three exhibits, if you will.
Exhibit 1: Jeff Gaulin graduated from journalism school at the University of Western Ontario in 1995. He started Jeff Gaulin’s Journalism Job Board that same year as an online employment service to help his classmates find work after graduation. His job board quickly became the go-to online job board for new journalism graduates across Canada looking for their first job and to a lesser but not insignificant extent also became an important resource for even experienced journalists looking to switch jobs. I landed four newspaper jobs off it myself in a six-year period between 2001 and 2007.
Before Jeff Gaulin’s Journalism Job Board came on the scene, aspiring journalism job applicants, believe it or not, often sent out resumes hit-or-miss over the transom in 9 x 12 brown envelopes, which also contained their “clips.” As terribly inefficient and labour intensive as that was, it actually worked. At least sometimes. I landed at least a couple of my early daily newspaper jobs in the 1980s that way.
I also interviewed a fair number of job candidates between 2004 and 2013, as a result of Jeff’s job board, and was involved in hiring a number of them as reporters. As recently as several years ago, it wasn’t unusual to see 60 to 70 print jobs advertised on any given day, although the number fluctuated, and dropped briefly but dramatically in 2008-09, during the Great Recession, before rebounding.
As of noon today, there were just eight print media jobs from coast-to-coast listed on Jeff Gaulin’s Journalism Job Board. Eight. And if you think things might be better on the digital side in Jeff’s “new media” section, think again. It has four – half as many – jobs advertised as the “print” section.
Exhibit 2? RBC Dominion Securities just cut its price target on Postmedia Network Canada Corp., publisher of the National Post and proprietor of Canada’s largest newspaper chain and various digital media properties, to zero from $0.50.
Zero. As in zero-sum game.
Exhibit 3:
Mass extinction, niche survival.
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