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The newspaper industry is all abuzz today with the news that the Columbia Journalism Review has slashed its online budget to fund a direct mail campaign for its print edition. Screams of cutting off its head to spite its face ensued - especially from those who were slashed right out of jobs. I was reading David Hirschman's coverage of the cuts in Editor & Publisher - at an emotional distance, just interesting stuff. But it hit me how close to home this hits for most associations when I got to this paragraph:

By shifting resources to the print edition of the magazine, CJR is essentially saying that it would rather serve the 20,000 aging journalists who still like to get a paper edition in their mailboxes (and attract a few more perhaps), than continue or expand the dynamic, globally accessible product Lovelady has created over the past year and a half.

Whenever someone contacts me for advice on how to bring more communications online, the first question they always ask is, What about the print pieces? The questioner rightly assumes that this is going to create double work - he's going to be doing an online publication and a dead-tree edition too. I then have to admit that this is generally true (at least in my case).

Columbia Journalism School dean Nick Lemann, in a recent New Yorker article analyzing the growing influence of the Web and citizen journalism, stated: "As journalism moves to the Internet, the main project ought to be moving reporters there, not stripping them away." Then he cut his own online budget by 45%.

Why? Lemann explained in a statement that "everybody in journalism knows, [the Web] does not yet produce revenues commensurate with its quality."

Hirschman doesn't buy that argument - and neither do the thousands of companies spending millions of dollars on online ads each year. He points out that even The New York Times has diverted monies from direct mail campaigns to online behavioral targeting.

Hirschman ends his article with another statement directly applicable to associations: "In 2006 you can't rescue floundering print products by relying on more print."