Delivery vs. information

This past week, E&P picked up the story of The News & Observer getting out of the trucking business. Penske Logistics will take over the job of delivering bundles to the nine distribution centers and other sites outside the immediate region.

The independent contracts we know as carriers, still have their contracts to deliver directly to subscribers. People getting the N&O delivered to their homes will still deal with the same people.

Still, 17 full-time jobs and many more part-time jobs will be eliminated from the N&O payroll. (Publisher Orage Quarles believes many of those people will get jobs with Penske.)

Here's another way of looking at this other than just cutting FTEs from a payroll: This move actually follows what some people in the industry have been talking about for a few years, that we are in the information business, not the ink, paper and delivery business.

Through the years, newspapers became good at delivering physical products to physical locations. But other businesses also excel at delivery. What no one else excels at is providing reliable news and information, being a watchdog of government and connecting buyers and sellers. Focusing on those parts of the business that no one else can do makes real sense to this blogger.