Playing Through: What Newspapers Could Learn From Golf

By: Mark Fitzgerald Channel surfing the other night, I came across a cable business news show featuring the CEO of Callaway Golf Co. as its guest. "What's your biggest frustration about Wall Street?" he was asked.

The CEO said he wished the Street would distinguish among the various publicly traded golf companies -- rather than blindly hammering down the entire sector on pessimism about its ability to rebound now and for the future.

Whoa, I thought, what other industry does that sound like?

E&P Associate Editor Jennifer Saba and I use the many striking parallels between golf and the newspaper industry as a stepping-off point to discuss unfairly punished newspaper stocks in the latest edition of our business-oriented podcast, "Fitz & Jen Give You The Business."

But when I talked about the comparisons with a friend in the industry over a couple of Ketel One vodkas after work Wednesday, he brought up some equally interesting differences that suggest golf is positioning itself much better for the future than our besieged industry.

First, to the parallels.

Golf and newspapers are under similar so-called secular pressures. Just as newspapers have been losing readers to the Internet for years now, the number of people playing golf is at best flat, and by some counts is declining. The number of rounds played has been stagnant for the last five years, according to Scott Kauffman, writing in the National Golf Course Owners Association's trade magazine, Golf Business.

Survey newspaper non-readers and non-golfers or former golfers, and you'll often get the same excuse -- they just don't think they have the time to wade through a paper or carve out an afternoon to tramp 18 holes.

Golf and newspapers share an identical cyclical pressure as well: the collapse in real estate.

"For an industry so inextricably linked to real estate, the timing of this 'market correction' certainly couldn't be any worse for golf, given the game's own growth issues," Kauffman writes.

For the first time in six decades, more golf courses closed (146) than were opened (119) in 2006, the last year for which statistics were available. But a longer-term chart might resemble sliding newspaper circulation: 2006 was the sixth consecutive year in which fewer golf courses were opened than the year before.

Interestingly too, Kauffman reports that the real estate slump is having a disproportionate effect on courses in big markets -- just as it is having on metro dailies that are faring far worse than their community newspaper cousins.

Then there's the youth problem. Newspapers can't get kids and young adults to read in anywhere near the numbers of older generations. And golf, with its old-fogey, plaid-pants image, for years has been losing the youth market to X-sports and video games.

For golf course builders, this long-term problem is also bound up in the real estate collapse. Golf Business' Kauffman quotes housing developers as warning that building around a golf course could be disastrous if the market is young buyers.

"In other words, if your business model is built around selling homes to younger, less-established individuals who may or may not be golfers -- the very demographic that most often turned to subprime mortgages -- chances are you'll have a tough go of it for the immediate future.

But here's where the parallel diverges.

I don't know much about golf, but it sure appears the sport's organizers are trying harder to reach young people than the newspaper industry in general.

The United States Golf Association, working in partnership with organizations such as the golf course owners, offer literally thousands of programs around the country to, as one puts it, "Hook-a-Kid On Golf."

JuniorLinks.com is a database listing more than 2,000 junior golf programs. USGA coordinates efforts with periodic "Junior Golf Summits" of program directors, course managers, golf pros, and others. "Kids On Course" tries to make playing junior golf affordable with lower green fees. "Catch The Spirit" entices kids and families to golf with stuffed goodie bags and front-row grandstand seating at the U.S. Women's Open. There are girl golfer programs with the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA), and even a program for deaf and blind kids run by the USGA and the Colorado School for the Deaf And Blind.

Meanwhile, newspapers are cutting back more on their already modest Newspaper In Education (NIE) programs -- when they're not dumping them entirely.

Getting newspapers into the hands of the next generation has been pretty much demonized as junk circ, especially in big markets. The loudest complaints about NIE circ seemed to come from Wall Street analysts rather than advertisers who supposedly disdain this particular kind of third-party sales.

Too often, promising youth-oriented pubs or Web sites are abandoned when they fail to go cashflow-positive within a year or so. Oh, well, we tried, publishers tell each other. Just can't figure out these kids.

There are other differences between golf and newspapers, though maybe I'm getting into stretch territory here.

For instance, golf lionizes its stars to the point that even non-enthusiasts like myself know current and past players by their first names: Tiger, Phil, Annika, Seve, Arnold, Ben, Greg, Chi Chi. Newspapers instead are buying out the few journalists such as David Broder or Bob Woodward who are household names nationally.

More than a century ago, George Ade wrote a Fable In Slang about a caddy carrying the bags of indolent rich golfers prattling on about nothing. The boy thinks of his working-class father, clearly a newspaper reader who could talk of "how J. Pierpont Morgan done up a Free People on the Bond Issue." Yet his father rarely had one dollar to rub up against another, "while these superficial Johnnies who played Golf all the Time had Money to Throw at the Birds."

"The more he thought," Ade wrote, "the more his head ached."

In the newspaper industry, plenty of heads are aching -- but is there as much deep thinking about the future as among the superficial Johnnies who play golf?