Last Wednesday, as Roger and myself arrived at a restaurant in Monterrey Mexico for a lunch meeting, news broke about a hijacked Aeromexico plane at Mexico City’s airport.
By the time we started our lunch with Ramón Alberto Garza, founder and CEO of IndigoMedia (and certainly one of the most proficent journalists in México), news coverage was taking over radio stations, and text alerts and phone calls from friends were rapidly becoming the conduit of news updates.
This week, Edmonton’s SeeMagazine did a great interview of Roger Black, and the headline couldn’t be more provocative for publishers, editors or anyone involved in the newspaper industry: Can good design save newspapers?
The Pareto Principle, sometimes also called “the law of the vital few,” is named after Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist of the 19th Century. What, you may ask, does a man who died nearly a hundred years ago have to say to the newspaper business of today? Pareto discovered, studying the economy of Italy at the time, that 20% of the population produced 80% of the gross national product.
The newspaper business is in freefall. An ailing international economy, rocketing paper and fuel costs, dwindling ad revenue – all these factors have combined to create a perfect storm that seems likely to swamp the once-mighty industry. In 2007, US newspapers reported their worst sales decline in history as print revenues fell 9.4% to $42.2 billion – and that’s the good news.
