No News Is Good News?
When the Dallas Cowboys released Terrell Owens in early March 2009, Facebook and Twitter updates were abuzz with indignation, celebration, and indifference. Despite the differences among those reactions, one thing could be agreed on: by the time the newspaper printed a story the next morning, T.O.’s release was no longer breaking news.
To compound matters, his release was a developing story full of off-the-record sources revealing information well before the release was made public and official the next day. Web sites were updated with supplemental news as quickly as it came in, meaning the local newspaper wasn’t only scooped by ESPN.com, a national news outlet—it was printing day-old information.
The Internet age has presented fresh challenges to an industry already fighting a war on a recessive, economic front. Newspaper revenue, which stems from advertising sales, is directly proportional to a publication’s circulation. When readership goes down, so does the revenue, so does the size of the staff, and so does the quality of reporting.
It would appear, then, that amidst unprecedented layoffs and budgets cuts, newspapers are becoming more and more obsolete.
The Cincinnati &Kentucky Post newspapers, for example, closed in 2006 after 126 years of print, The Rocky Mountain News published its final paper in February 2009 just shy of its 150 anniversary, and The Fort Worth Star-Telegram recently announced additional budget cuts and layoffs, citing advertising revenues as the culprit.
Still, 40 percent of Americans read a newspaper, according to a Pew Research Center for the People & the Press report released in 2006. Those numbers are down from 71 percent in 1965.
While the future of newspapers may look bleak, these tough times are forcing the print industry to overhaul its publication’s revenue stream.
Among those overhaul options is making it possible for newspapers to register as nonprofits. Senator Ben Cardin, D-Maryland, proposed the Newspaper Revitalization Act that would grant a nonprofit status to newspapers. Or, like the French counterpart, the American newspaper industry could look toward the government for a bailout.
Of course, nonprofits and newspaper bailouts aren’t without their critics.
Washington Post columnist, Adam Ross, said newspapers that appear all too chummy with their government aren’t as trustworthy as independent business models and would ultimately result in backlash, thereby hurting the very industry the bailout was intended to help.
“A reliance on government subsidies undermines the independence that gives media organizations their authority,” Ross wrote. “Readers aren’t likely to trust a newspaper that seems to be in bed with the government.”
Still other methods call for limiting the availability of news on any given news Web site. Instead of providing a free online news buffet, some syndicates are looking at charging readers a subscription cost, thereby requiring visitors to log-in for their news.
The Web site InDenverTimes.com, whose staff is made up primarily of former Rocky Mountain News journalists, intends to provide free online news content to all visitors, paid for by 50,000 subscribers who will get additional functionality at $4.99 a month.
“Journalism is not free, it’s expensive. Good journalism is very expensive and we need the people of this community to be vested behind this idea, and to help pay for that quality journalism,” Kevin Preblud, InDenver Times employee, told theDenverchannel.com.
The InDenverTimes.com appears to be onto something. While newspaper readership might be down, it isn’t the result of an uninterested population. Rather, the newspaper industry’s problem might be found in the very name—newspaper.
Jack Meyers thinks so anyway. Should newspapers have focused more on “news” than “papers,” he argues, they would have rightfully invested in the digital revolution early on.
“But they didn’t and now, for the most part, they are just one of many competitors with little unique differentiation and a weak business model,” Meyers wrote in, Is There a Future to Journalism?
While a national market might not be the best for newspapers to compete in, some experts predict that a newspaper’s community, and the localization of news, will ultimately save them.
Thoughts?
5 Responses
The newspapers I come into contact with that are doing well right now are community-focused. In fact, some of them still have not jumped on new technology. Rather, they have continued to focus on the things they’ve always done well. Technology will continue to be a part of that, of course.
I am curious about the idea of a National Public Newspaper, similar to NPR.
You’re confusing several issues here: decreasing readership (declining since the early 1980s, *before* free news was available on the Web); loss of advertising revenue; corporate consolidation of newspapers; journalistic practices in the face of a faster news cycle; searching for a new business model to support our nostalgic longing for print. (I don’t claim to have caught them all.)
While overlapping and interrelated, these issues are distinct. I’ll look at one: I don’t thing the journalistic model is broken.
That the Dallas Morning News was scooped by ESPN.com is not surprising: print is distributed once a day; the Web is 60/60/24/7. It used to be that newspapers had the monopoly on distributing news. Radio and television began to scoop the stories, and still can, but only in 30 second sound bites.
Now all old media face a faster competitor. But it’s not the journalistic model that is broken, and throwing money at it won’t fix it.
Congress could pour billions of dollars into a bailout or into subsidies for newspapers, and The News still would have been scooped. We don’t expect Newsweek or The New Yorker to have the latest factoids. They’re weeklies. Harpers and The Atlantic are monthlies. They are competitive against daily newspapers for their depth, not their speed.
Dailies still serve the folks — and yes, there are those living among us — who do not want their news from the Web, who do not have tweets pushed to their cell phones. Technophobes, some; luddites, possibly. But I, for one, like the voice of the newspaper: a calm and reasoned tone, slightly cynical, somewhat skeptical, definitely removed from the hype and the hyper. I want to read a complete report after the chaff of rumor and speculation has been separated out and blown away.
And depth. I rarely can figure out what people are all atwitter about 140 characters at a time: the context is buried under a thousand twits and tweets. Blog posts may link back to the original articles. I find I’d rather get the opinion later, but give me the full story first, in a form I can read at my own pace, at my own convenience, at my own leisure.
If the editors at the Dallas Morning News, and other papers, haven’t figured that out yet, then I’ll concede their journalism model is broken.
Now, since advertising dollars have flown and corporations keep newspapers only for high profits, we see journalists getting laid off. Those who are left don’t have the time or resources do the work they need to. They neither can pursue stories in depth, nor keep up with the Web.
But how to fund journalism needs to be a separate discussion.
Note my comment from another question here:
I believe the future of news is…
Fast Twitch news ie; Michael Jack son is dead! will continue to spread through the face book and twitterverse rapidly. There’s no copy right on simple factual informa tion. That level of news “production” is already so splintered so as to have less signif icance to a news organization’s bottom line EXCEPT for those that have cultivated a reputation as news breakers ala TMZ.com.
Slow Twitch news ie; A look back at the whole season for the New Orleans Saints analyzing the most critical moments that lead to them going to the Superbowl with exclusive photos and video…This kind of news will be worth paying for. It will be protected from deep linking. It will be contained within proprietary formats (think iPad) and any non authorized copying or use will be vigorously litigated (think Nap ster). It will be behind a paywall.
It’s very hard to contain information. The web broke the news monopoly but the
news organization was built by the ability to contain and present the news.
The aggregation of the audience was (and is) what matters. Not what the content is
or how good it is or how in depth it is. How many examples would you like?
TMZ.com is huge but does not present beautiful photos or in depth analyses.
High quality journalism is expensive so clearly the low quality fast twitch news will fall to the tweets and other social media and the better stuff, the stuff that actually matters will cost you something.
High quality journalism is expensive — and so very worth it! We just need to convince/remind people of this more frequently!
Look at Atlantic Monthly, or ANY magazine where the writing really matters. How successful is that magazine? If the success of a print publication (or for that matter a website) is based on aggregating the largest audience it’s rather obvious that news about Paris Hilton will trump news about the budget deficit.
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