We know that newspapers face, at the very least, significant challenge to both their revenue and readership from young and agile online competition.
This challenge is what new-ish LA Times editor James O'Shea addressed in this open letter to staff and gives some great detail about the view inside the LA Times - or at least the tip of the iceberg they'll allow us to see.
Print ad revenue for the LA Times motoring section, which totalled $102m in 2004, is projected to fall to $55m this year. Some slight increase in online ad revenue will offset this, but only by an estimated $24m. And other advertising areas are affected too.
O'Shea's predecessor Dean Baquet refused to cut jobs and was fired as a result. He's re-emerged as the new Washington bureau chief for the New York Times.
The wider picture would be a great subject for a Harvard thesis, said O'Shea, but he specifically name checks Google and Craigslist for "stealing readers and advertisers" - as if newspapers have some God-given right to them. That theft he rightly credits to their innovative strategies that are undermining the business model newspapers have relied on for decides. Centuries, even.
These trends are threatening not just the company revenues but the future of news itself - the "daily bread of democracy".
The solution?
• Mandatory training for all staff - even "old dogs", like O'Shea, that will tackle some new tricks.
• An integrated print and online newsroom.
• A new special editor for innovation, Ross Stanton, who will lead integration.
• News will be broken on the website.
• The paper will be redesigned, with a renewed focus on analysis and interpretation.
The integrity of the newspaper and its journalism will not be diminished by integration, said O'Shea: "It is the thing that distinguishes us from the prattle and rabble on the internet."
But Stanton will challenge the news team: "By virtue of its lightning speed and undisciplined nature, the internet poses unique challenges to the way we practice journalism. Change is coming: it has to."
Does any of this sound very new? Not really. But laying out this strategy openly and publicly is hugely important.
Turning the tanker
I'm fascinated by the "turning the tanker" strategies and the impact they have, so this kind of confessional is manna from heaven.
O'Shea bravely blames this on everyone: every editor, reporter, photographer and artist: "Everyone who ever came up with an excuse as to why we can't do something new and different."
Actually I think that's true of just about every organisation and every person. Few of us like to be removed from our comfort zone, and few of us treat the challenge and uncertainty of the new as opportunity, rather than threat.
The newsroom can be "a cold, defensive, insular and conservative place, plagued by a bunker mentality that hides behind tradition and treats change as a threat".
"In my limited time here, I've heard a lot of talk about why we can't do things, the lack of resources, the lack of people.
"The future is in our hands as storytellers, the one constant in our ever-changing universe."
