McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt's April Speech in Anchorage Part 1

Gary Pruitt, the CEO of McClatchy, which owns the Anchorage Daily News, gave a speech (there's an audio of the speech at the lin) to Commonwealth North in Anchorage in late April 2008. It started off promising to be a stock speech full of pithy quotes, but then he began to cover a lot of interesting ground. I would guess he spent time putting this speech together and that he's given variations of it more than once. It’s got a lot of things worth discussing. I’ve been mulling it over trying to figure out the best way to do this. Many of the points he raises are worthy of long separate posts of their own. So I'm not going to try to squeeze it all into one post.

Why does this matter?

• The media are a vital part of maintaining a democracy. And as the corporatization of everything takes place, we need to be watchful about what this means. But what happens when this happens to the media itself? The institution that is supposed to do this watching and report to the public? Well, Pruitt gives us some hints hidden in amongst his other points.
  
  
• It also affects how people in Anchorage and in Alaska are going to get news about what is happening in the state. My belief is that an organization dedicated to covering the important news (and we an argue about who defines what is the important news) and pays people to gather and sometimes even investigate “the news” is vital to maintaining an informed citizenry, which is vital to real democracy. Can, will television or radio or the internet be able to take over that function if the newspaper disappears?
  

Overview of this post and follow up posts on this speech
So, in this post I’m going to give you an overview of the talk and the first section - history. Then in other posts I’m going to follow up on different threads.

The speech's five key parts (not necessarily in the order he gives the speech):

1. The history of newspapers in general and McClatchy in particular
2. Models or stories of how things are in the newspaper world
   By this I mean, he talks about the way he thinks things are going and can go. He outlines how “McClatchy” plans (since McClatchy is an organization and not a sentient being, it can’t really think or plan, so this really means how Pruitt plans) to respond to the world it faces. From this we can deduce other possible ways of thinking about the future of newspapers and media, and by extension, democracy.
3. McClatchy and ADN data
   Here he gives us the outcomes, in quantitative terms, of the McClatchy plan. Numbers of readers, dollars, etc.
   
4. Philosophy and values
   This is hard to separate from models, but I’d distinguish the two this way: the Models are attempts to describe and interpret what’s happening in Pruitt’s world. Philosophy is telling us what Pruitt values and how he thinks things should be.
5. Anecdotes and Miscellaneous odds and ends
   Stuff that doesn’t fit neatly into the other categories or overlaps over some or all of them.
   

(I would point out that Pruitt didn't label the parts of his speech this way and that any five people could come up with their own set of key parts. These are my take on the speech, but don't assume that I've captured it perfectly.)

I’ll try to post at least one point per day in the next five days. Then I’ll try to explore some of the paths he leads us by, but doesn’t wander down.

Here’s the easy one, History.

McClatchy was founded in 1857 and has survived while many competitors came and went. People prophesied the demise of the newspaper when other new technologies arose, such as radio and television. And many newspapers did go under.

By 1960 most local markets were down to one newspaper. Anchorage was an exception. There was an exciting, but costly battle between the Daily News and the Times. Once newspapers had a monopoly in their area, they were quite profitable.

Then the internet arrived. It quickly began taking the profitable classifieds - housing, cars, employment.

But, as radio and tv stations proliferated and their markets became increasingly fragmented, the local daily newspapers died out until there was only one newspaper in each local market. While the newspaper competes with many local television and radio stations and many websites, it tends to be the only daily newspaper in town.

Only when there was one newspapers in a market, did they become quite profitable. Quasi-monopoly. That’s when they started to go public (change from private ownership to selling public shares.) Pruitt said we can meet our journalistic obligations and Wall St. demands.

Now in a transformational stage. Many individual newspapers have, and others will, go under, But the newspaper industry will survive. McClatchy will survive. ADN will survive. By the old measures - current revenues - we don't look good. But by the new metrics - we look good. The transition to having both a print and internet presence is not easy.



By tomorrow I’ll try to get the models, but that really isn’t an easy one.

Meanwhile you can listen to the whole speech here. With questions, it's an hour.

[June 24: There is now a Part 2 and a Part 3 will be up soon. Or you can click on the Gary Pruitt label in the lower right column.]