If a drug lord like Amado Carrillo were in the business of journalism today, he would have every newspaper owner in the country shot like dogs.
The Lord of the Skies would call them what they are, grinning mira putas who started using their own oh-so addictive product and crashed to the earth as a result; once powerful magnates who lived in narco-castles, now low-life drug mules wondering what went wrong after giving away their product for ten years.
Sadly, the newspaper owners today have done precisely that, wetting themselves with excitement over “Most-Viewed Stories” while ignoring the fact that those doing the most viewing are merely clicking on the story, never the ads.
The Nielsen Online Ratings came in a few weeks ago and they show some fantastic upticks in the number of readers of the nation’s greatest newspapers. Trouble is, the numbers are useless; in fact, worse than useless; they’re fool’s gold.
The nation’s greatest newspapers have pimped out their finest journalism for the free Web hits, stressed-out pushers flooding the market with free coke now wondering why nobody’s paying and everybody’s disrespecting.
He’d tell them what every Sinaloan weed grower knows: you stay away from the attention and you invest your time in making money.
This fact, that people are happy to receive what newspapers put out for free, is then billed as a success in journalism.
In the dating world; women who use the same flawed practice on the first date are often called “confused” or “worse.”
In the narco-world, this practice is called “going broke” or “getting dead.”
But it’s what newspapers have been doing for a decade now; offering up their product for free online while the advertisers were paying good money for print ads. Think you’re supporting your local paper by clicking on their ads? Think again; papers only make ten percent of their money from online advertising. And let’s have a moment of honesty here, shall we? Who among you has clicked on an ad? Unless there’s a chance to win: a free iPod, a free Saturn or a month of free porn, I sure don’t and I don’t know anyone else who does (I’m kidding about the porn, mostly).
What business model did the newspapers learn this from, anyway? Who else does this? No sales manager that I know would ever consider such a thing. Small samples are acceptable; but it’s why the Trader Joe’s sample girl only gives you a small taste – then glares at you when you come back for seconds and thirds.
I’ve been perusing the Finance section of the newspaper industry’s greatest losings (again, for free) and the excuses are all the same; a failing economy, a housing market bust, rising gas prices, hell, they’ll be blaming food costs next.
But the soundest reason I can see is that these newspapers are so invested in their own egos that they’ve spent the last ten years fighting for the attention of cheapened readers who could not care less what they offer so long as they don’t have to pay for it.
Ten years later, my admittedly-crude analogy still holds true. Having gotten used to getting it for free, newspapers are going to have to recondition readers to treating them right and paying up a fee. Consider these online readership numbers:
The New York Times, 30 percent increase in online readership over 2007.
Washington Post, 13 percent.
Dallas Morning News, 96 percent.
But the only numbers that matter are those on Wall Street and the jefes are no longer happy. In fact, they are punishing the newspapers; thrashing them like unruly step-children.
Consider:
The money jefes put McClatchy Co., the company that bought out Knight-Ridder in 2006, on a near deathwatch after another 15 percent drop in ad revenue.
Lee Enterprises, owners of the Arizona Daily Star and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, hit a new year low earlier this week.
Since Wednesday, the newspaper’s stock dropped yet another ten percent to $7.45 a share this morning. (It dropped another two cents as I was writing this).
Gannett, publisher of The Arizona Republic dropped like a falling angel, then reported a nine percent drop in the first quarter.
It is a sad and sorry state of affairs for the newspapers these days when they can boast about how many people are reading them for free while they’re busily laying off employees, dumping their smaller newspapers, and cutting the print editions further and further down.
This is why newspapers need an Amado Carrillo Fuentes; someone who can step up and order them all to quit pissing off, under threat of getting whacked.
In the 1990s, with Mexico’s drug cartels in disarray and the U.S-bound Colombian coke skirting Mexico for trafficking through the Caribbean; the young Sinaloan with the blue eyes and perfect smile stepped in and made an offer noone could refuse.
Slowly, over the course of seven years, Amado Carrillo organized the warring drug cartels of northwestern Mexico into a single, powerful narco-syndicate, the Sinaloa Federation. The joint operating agreement allowed everyone to make money while sharing bought-off border officials and Colombian cocaine distributors. Everybody took a split of the U.S.-Mexico border and swore not to run over in each other’s territory. It worked beautifully; from 1992 onward, the Sinaloans controlled parts of California, all of Arizona and most of passable Texas; roughly 1,400 miles of the 2,000 mile-long border. Suddenly, the Colombians were much more friendly, paying in cocaine instead of cash; everybody made money.
Amado Carrillo’s genius relied on the premise that you could continue trying to dominate the market by pretending your competition doesn’t exist, but you could make a lot more – and take less losses – if you’d just settle down and keep to your own turf. Get out of line, and you weren’t betraying the next narco over, now you were betraying an entire web of organized cartels. Step wrong and you could not survive.
On a sidenote, the best example of what not to do was Oscar Obregón Sosa, the Sonoran coke buyer for the Tijuana Cartel. Amado made a lesson of that vato; he was shot 18 times, then the Sinaloans pulled his body out of the grave where he was buried in Hermosillo and put five more rounds in his corpse just to make sure the message stayed clear: Don’t fuck around.
What newspapers need is an Amado Carrillo to bring them together and order everyone to start charging for their online content. The pricing can be relative to your size; the Arizona Daily Sun can charge $12 a month, the Arizona Republic $20. The syndicate can even establish narco-buyer rates; I don’t know, something like, “click on 20 ads a month and get your fee waived.’
Some, perhaps most, online readers will flee; but who cares? These are “readers,” not “customers.” Let them go back to watching television if they don’t want to spend money for the product.
Newspapers need to do something beyond wring their hands over Web sites like this one, MexicoReporter, EspressoPundit, or Rum, Romanism and Rebellion stealing their readers. Those three, like me, run their sites for their own twisted reasons, money isn’t one of them. If that is considered competition, then newspapers are even worse off than I thought.
Getting 4 trillion people to watch your latest online video of a car crash for free ain’t gonna fix your problems.
– Michel Marizco
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