By: Paul Conley

Paul Conley — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 22:08:32 +0000

Hi Dan,
I’m flattered that my thoughts may be playing some role in this chapter of your book.
However, I’m going to ask you to take extra care to put them in context. I think the past 21 months have shown that I was right.
So let’s review:
I wrote that piece on Jan. 9, 2008. It was part of a larger series in which I warned that a recession was coming, that things would be awful in 2008, and that it was time to strike a defensive pose — cutting costs, etc. It was also time, I said, to stop wasting time on getting people ready for the fight ahead. I told B2B publishers that we were too vulnerable to spend resources on people who had failed to keep up.
That was nothing new for me.
A month earlier I warned that “2008 is going to be an awful year for B2B publishing” and urged the industry to reduce its revenue expectations and start worrying about the debt loads:
http://paulconley.blogspot.com/2007/12/year-of-living-unreasonably.html
Privately I warned my clients that disaster was upon us, that they needed to scale back expansion plans, lay off staff, renegotiate debt covenants and cut all nonessential spending — including any sort of continuing-ed training for journalists.
It’s clear what I was saying as 2007 ended and 2008 began: The media industry was in grave danger. It was time for us to start acting like it.
By April of 2008, things had deteriorated. I had been proven right. But I was taking no joy in it. Instead, I predicted that the B2B industry as we had known it was about to collapse. I wrote that “much of B2B publishing — weighed down by the twin albatrosses of junk bonds and rising print costs — has sunk into a death spiral.”
http://paulconley.blogspot.com/2008/04/financial-crisis-in-b2b-publishing.html
I was right then too.
As of today most of the B2B publishing giants are struggling. We’ve had companies seized by bondholders and banks. We’ve had more Chapter 11 filings than I can remember.
On the other hand, there are dozens of B2B publishers that have weathered this storm quite well. A good portion of them have been my clients. They did what they needed to do in order to survive the downturn and be positioned for the recovery. They realized what so few other publishers, pundits and academics seemed to understand: when a crisis is driven by falling revenue, rising costs and untenable debt/equity ratios, the answer isn’t more training.
It’s been 21 months since I wrote the piece that you say is relevant to the chapter.
The companies and publications that adopted the tactics I suggested (and I was hardly the only person to suggest such moves) are still standing. I’m pleased by that.
Lord knows I took a lot of grief for what I said then. Interestingly, very little of that grief came from people in the industry I was writing about (B2B.)
But there was endless and often vicious complaining from people in B2C newspapers. They seemed not to understand that my blog, which is about B2B journalism, wasn’t about them. Hell, newspaper journalists think everything in journalism is about them. And they were adamant that training needed to be a priority in 2008. They said it was time to invest in the staff. If I remember right, they thought that training would save the newspaper industry. They kept saying something about improving quality as a way to move advertisers and readers to their newspaper Web sites.
So, how did that work out?

Comments on: Why Traditional News Organizations Should Make Media Education a Priority: Prior Writings

By: Paul Conley