History of Dodge pickup trucks

Dodge has been building pickup trucks since 1914 when they offered light truck. In 2009, their trucks lines were merged into single bran named Ram. Ram was a name introduced in 1981 for the Dodge’s light-duty models. The ram model was available up to 1993 with little improvement. In the late 80′s Dodge introduced the Cummings powerful and reliable engine as an option. In the late 90′s, the Dodge Laramie was introduced as a high end luxurious version of the Dodge Ram.

Newspapers in crisis: Are we at the end of an era, or the start of something new?

Ever since the rise of the World Wide Web and the decline of circulations at virtually every major daily, there’s been plenty of talk about the future of the newspaper business. A chorus of voices, from pundits to academics to investors, have chimed in with opinions, most predicting doom and gloom for the industry. Despite all the talk, though, most newspapers have remained fairly profitable.

But it can’t last.

That, at least, is according to the legendary investor and second-richest man in the world, Warren Buffett. The “Oracle of Omaha,” as he is known for his investment acumen and humble origins from the Cornhusker State, has been saying for years that newspapers and television are headed for a big fall, business-wise. He reiterated that forecast earlier this month at an investors’ gathering in Toronto.

The problem, according to Buffett, is relatively simple. Media fragmentation has led to an explosion of competition for the traditional, major players in the news industry, and competition eats away at profits. Slowly but surely, the dominant business position of big-city newspapers has been eroded. It’s a slippery slope and Buffett sees no way to pull out of the slide.

“Newspapers face the prospect of seeing their earnings erode indefinitely,” he said at a 2006 shareholders meeting of Berkshire Hathaway, the holding company he chairs. “It’s unlikely that at most papers, circulation or ad pages will be larger in five years than they are now. That’s even true in cities that are growing…If anything, the decline is accelerating. Newspaper readers are heading into the cemetery, while newspaper non-readers are just getting out of college. The old virtuous circle, where big readership draws a lot of ads, which in turn draw more readers, has broken down.”

Despite Buffett’s grim prognosis, newspapers aren’t going down without a fight. The counter-attack strategy has been two-pronged at most major dailies. First, staunch the bleeding by cutting costs and reducing newsroom staff. Second, try to get a foothold in this new era of digital information and eventually find an online revenue stream to make up for the losses in print ads and circulation.

American Journalism Review senior editor Carl Stepp recently took an in-depth look at how several major U.S. newspapers are attempting to adjust their business models in this way by restructuring their organizations from the ground up.

At the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, for example, the traditional news desks have been abolished and there are now just four departments. Two are responsible for producing content: the News and Information department handles breaking news while the Enterprise department pursues more in-depth and watchdog-type stories. The other two departments, Digital and Print, select the content they need and put it together for the paper’s online and print versions, respectively. Digital tends to draw mostly from News and Information, while Print relies more heavily on Enterprise.

“We had a newsroom built for the old world,” explained editor Julia Wallace. “In the old world, the content people had control of print but not online, and I thought that was an unwinnable situation. We can’t just be a newspaper anymore. We need to be a news and information company. Online will become the new mass medium, and print will be aimed at settled adults.”

The Gannett chain of newspapers (which includes the Arizona Republic, the Indianapolis Star, and USA Today) has taken a similar approach, morphing their newsrooms into “local information centers” aimed at gathering and disseminating information through print, the Internet, mobile phones and “any other media possible to meet our readers’ needs.”

The idea behind all these changes essentially boils down to an “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” attitude. Newspapers, threatened by the emergence of so much digital media, are trying to play along instead of being left behind. But the rush to digitize is a gamble, as the economic fundamentals just aren’t there yet for this nascent business model. So while many newspapers have managed to go multi-media in their content delivery, virtually none have yet found a way to rake in much revenue from the digital realm.

Despite some recent growth in online advertising, Internet ads still don’t generate nearly as much revenue as their traditional, print counterparts. According to media analyst John Morton: “Newspaper online advertising – most of it from up-selling from print editions – remains a small part of newspapers’ advertising revenue, a little more than five per cent of the total last year.

Even if Internet advertising turns out to be a viable source of revenue in the future – which is not at all clear at the moment, as online economics continue to evolve rapidly – Morton says newspapers still won’t survive because they were too slow in changing their business models and made too many missteps along the way.

“Most newspaper executives now are banking on a successful transfer of their business online to ensure future profitability. Unfortunately, they came late to the realization of how important this is and did not invest enough capital in the early years of the Internet,” he writes. “Instead, most newspaper companies concentrated on shoring up the profitability of their traditional newsprint-oriented business, chiefly through laying off employees, downsizing their newspapers and cutting back on circulation in distant areas of little interest to advertisers in their core markets. It was a classic defensive strategy that undermined the very things – standing, reputation, influence – that are crucial to success on the Internet.”

The sense that news organizations have undermined their own long-term sustainability through drastic newsroom cutbacks is shared by Charles Lewis, a former producer for 60 Minutes and current journalist-in-residence at American University in Washington.

“Not surprisingly, in recent years, the sheer volume, enterprise, and quality of serious news stories have quite noticeably diminished, especially among small and mid-size newspapers,” he writes in the Columbia Journalism Review. “What replaces that flow of information? What will nourish our democracy? Perhaps new stand-alone, advertising-supported, profitable venues for original newsgathering and storytelling – beyond subscription-based, niche publishing – will evolve in the digital age, as we all hope they will. But that hasn’t happened yet.”

In the absence of some significant new revenue stream, Lewis suggests the future of serious journalism may lie in the non-profit sector. He points to the success of the Associated Press, a not-for-profit co-operative, which has been around since 1846 and today employs 3,000 journalists at 243 bureaus in 97 countries. The AP has also managed to crack the online money-making enigma better than most for-profit news organizations, drawing roughly 15 per cent of its $680 million in revenue last year from digital sources, largely by forging relationships with the likes of Google and Yahoo.

Lewis also makes note of numerous other non-profit news organizations that that have found longevity and built solid reputations, including The Christian Science Monitor newspaper, Harper’s magazine and National Geographic. Then there’s National Public Radio, which has survived as a non-profit in the increasingly monopolized commercial American radio market and actually doubled its number of listeners in the past 10 years.

Since it has worked and continues to work for these organizations, Lewis believes the not-for-profit approach to journalism could be applied on a broader scale.

“Why not nonprofit online newspapers serving their communities … supported by local citizens and area foundations, or perhaps in association with local colleges and universities?” he writes. “Or, beyond the local scale, if five million people regularly coalesce as subscribing members of a National Geographic Society, why can’t other serious journalistic entities draw such numbers in a digital world, across borders? And beyond daily news coverage, is there a way to regularly generate high-quality, investigative and international reporting as a syndication service or as a ‘viewers like you’-supported Web destination? Such things are absolutely possible, and absolutely sustainable, with the right combinations of people, resources, and timing – and they are certainly needed.”

If Buffett’s prediction of indefinitely eroding revenues is correct – and he’s got a pretty good record when it comes to this kind of thing – then it’s just a matter of time until newspapers will no longer be viable businesses. That time has not yet come (Buffet, himself, still counts several major American dailies among his many profitable holdings) but depending on how the economics of the Internet play out, it might not be far off.