The yo-yo analogy

This blog post is dedicated to @virtualbrian, with whom a conversation about newspapers spawned my yo-yo analogy. It’s how I explain to non-newsies about what I think of the industry’s downward spiral.

Let’s just say you have a yo-yo factory. And it takes you 15 people to make yo-yos. Your yo-yos are pretty nice and people are generally happy with them. Life is good, and you’re pretty freakin’ happy with yourself.

Then, while you were busy thinking about how great you were, other people started making yo-yos. Just on the fringes, but they didn’t need factories to do it. Fewer people were buying your yo-yos because they could buy them other places for less, and they discovered they didn’t really NEED yo-yos to have fun. All of the sudden, things weren’t looking quite as rosy for you. So you cut a few people – but you aren’t really all that worried. Now it takes you 12 people to make your yo-yos.

Now things start to get a little hairy. For the young people, yo-yos are SO uncool. And fewer old people are attached to your yo-yos than ever before. To make matters worse, you’ve had to scale down the quality of your yo-yos to cut costs, and people are grumbling that they just aren’t as good as they were before. The more you have to cut costs, the crappier of a yo-yo you put out.

At what point, dear reader, do you stop making crappy yo-yos the SAME OLD way and figure out how to make a better yo-yo – something people really want and need – with less than 12 people?

The obvious point being: Newspapers just keep turning out less and less of the same product the way they’ve always produced it. They don’t want to change the business model. What other kind of company would survive by doing that?

If you paid FedEx to get a package somewhere in 2 days, and it took them 4, and then they said to you “Well, you know, we’re having trouble paying the bills because less and less people are using us,” would you consider that a valid excuse? More importantly, would you ever use them again?

Newspapers need to learn to listen, and give people the product (read: information) that they really want. Then they need to learn that they’re a business, and figure out how to produce a must-have product with lower internal costs.