Austin Beutner has a task of protecting his different print dinosaurs from becoming extinct while nurturing the newer businesses that could someday be there replacements.
Beutner is the publisher and CEO of the Los Angeles Times, whose parent company based in Chicago, Tribune Publishing agreed to pay more than $85 million for U-T San Diego.
If this deal closes as it is expected to in the upcoming weeks, he will run the two institutions in Southern California, which dominated the newsgathering in each of their markets.
Beutner does not think he invented a solution that is breakthrough to the existential problems in the industry, instead he is betting essentially on brand recognition as well as the expertise of his workers to unearth profits.
This strategy contains three parts: Cutting many costs via regional consolidation, raising the quality in journalism and expanding on digital products.
Digital is the key challenge over the long term. Beutner only arrived in August at the Times, after working in a lucrative private equity career, investment banking or government service. Amongst the initial priorities was the building of niche products for its readers, who use smartphones and tablets.
One early success had been Essential California. Available online or by email, the newsletter has a list of summaries as well as links to different articles, interactive formats or videos with offers form the newsletter with additional information.
Content is partly from the California print section of the newspaper.
From a business point of view advertisers have been paying higher rates to reach the close to 80,000 subscribers on Essential California who are looked at as being more engaged and more apt to pay attention to the targeted ads, than those who arrive via search engines.
