I spent 15 years working for newspapers so it’s not surprising that despite being a digital creature, I still love reading newspapers – the ones made with paper that leave ink stains on your fingers.
Even though I’m no longer a journalist, it’s troubling to see how newspapers are crumbling before our eyes – victims of a business model that doesn’t work anymore, high debt loads brought on by strategic dreams about convergence, and a struggling economy.
The Rocky Mountain News closes, the Miami Herald sheds 200 jobs, the Globe & Mail offers severance packages, the Washington Post downsizes its business section, and on it goes.
There are many questions about what’s happening and who to blame but perhaps the biggest question is whether the struggles of newspapers really matter. Is the world going to be a worst place if newspapers (products made from dead trees) continue to disappear?
As much as I love newspapers, I don’t think it will matter if they go the way of the dinosaur. To me, newspapers are a “platform” that is being antiquated as new technology becomes a more efficient, faster and less expensive distribution vehicle. Newspapers are expensive to produce and distribute. But the economic model that lets newspapers thrive (e.g. classified advertising) no longer works so newspapers no longer make sense economically.
So, if the current newspaper business model doesn’t work, what replaces it? For all the buzz about citizen journalism, it’s a different kind of journalism that involves “raw footage” as opposed to the research and perspective the journalists/reporters churn out – and that bloggers love to chew on.
If newspapers are going to survive and thrive, their operating models must radically change. This includes:
- Reporters need to be multi-functional. They need to write for the newspaper and the Web, they need to podcast, shoot video, blog, Twitter and use other social media tools. It will be an intense and challenging profession – a far cry from the days when journalists had the luxury of writing one or two stories a day.
- Journalism will no longer be a middle-class profession. In the new economic climate, it doesn’t work if you’ve got a newsroom with reporters making $75,000 to $125,000/year. The new newsroom will see most journalists make $40,000 to $50,000 while a small number of investigative reporters and columnists (aka stars) will make $75,000 to $100,000. It may not be great money but the rewards of being a journalist go far beyond their paychecks.
- Smaller newsrooms. Reporters will have to be more productive, and the stories they write will have to offer perspective (aka tell me what it means) as opposed to recounting what happened given the Web more than takes care of the “what happened” part.
- A focus on local news. With fewer reporters, newspapers will thrive by covering what’s happening in their own backyards, while leaving national and international news to wire services.
Even if newspapers embraced all these changes, the number of newspapers will likely continue to disappear. While it’s troubling to watch, there will be no lack of news given new media organizations can be quickly created. An example is Politico, which was started by a group of ex-Washington Post reporters. The challenge, of course, will be creating business models that let these new players do well.
More: TVO’s The Agenda had a feature last night on The State of Newspapers. Look for the video to appear soon.
More II: Clay Shirky has a lengthy post on the world of newspapers, including this telling paragraph:
Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.
Technorati Tags: blogs, newspapers
6 Comments
My wife is a journalist and I’m in the PR profession, so this is obviously a topic of interest in our household this morning as we enjoy coffee and a thinning Globe and Mail, featuring a very topical story.
http://business.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090313.wfcover14/BNStory/Business/home
The story today has one stat that I find most troubling…a Pew Institute study has found that 300 papers now have bureaus in Washington, half as many as 20 years ago.
I, like many, already question how effective traditional media has been post 9/11 in covering the WMD rationale for the Iraq war, or the debacle on Wall Street.
Rupert Murdoch factor Fox “News” have already blurred the lines of objective journalism. And the evisceration of Jim Cramer by Jon Stewart this week over his boosterism of Wall Street on CNBC’s “Mad Money” continues this trend.
A friend of ours at wire service Canadian Press already is also operating under Mark’s new model. The problem is between video taping a subject, providing a digital radio sound bite for radio, and posting a story for member papers online, she hardly has time for research or fact checking.
As Mark’s piece suggests there are new entities emerging. Climate Wire, an online environmental newsletter, has twice as many reporters in Washington as the Hearst Newspaper group that serves 7 major US dailies.
However, I don’t really know Climate Wire or their agenda, so as a “consumer” of news, I have to work harder to authenticate any “news” coming from this organization.
It’s a fundamental concern as the fifth estate crumbles to hopefully be reinvented in the digital future…who’s watching the watcher?
There are newsrooms where reporters make between $75,000 and $125,000? When I finished j-school four years ago, I was told to consider myself lucky if I could start at $25,000.
Of course, even in that state, the jobs were already clogged up and now they’re being shed. Not much of a chance for anyone younger.
That said, despite a certain level of bitterness toward the industry, I too would like newspapers to stick around. I’d rather not bring my laptop to the bathroom…
I think a career in journalism might come to resemble that of professional sports.
A small number of ’stars’ journalists will be able to reap most of the rewards from large followings. Most will earn a much more modest living but doing something they love and are somewhat happy they’re able to do for a living at all.
It definitely won’t be glamorous.
I’m afraid that news papers will disappear and that history will become as changeable as in the period of speech transistion of the past…
many websites and blogarticles are altered after publication whitout any mentionning of it,
many videos have disappeared from Youtube (anyone who has a copy of The second internet bubble song, please contact me @jansegers ASAP)
the printed work made people sure that they could look up the material they were discussing about in the form of historical sources that are unaltered
the problem of anything digital is that it’s perfectly feasable to create any second or third version of it whitout people noticing it and thus alterning the past like you wish
and the biggest problem is the possibility of a digital whipe-out by any magnetism accident or incident
distroying all copies of a printed work is extremely difficult, but distroying all digital
copies of it is feasable enough
Interesting post. Your pointers to what’s required look sound. Clay Shirky argues in his controversial article “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable” that because the barriers to entry in the industry have fallen close to zero, the future of newspaper-type journalism looks bleak in the internet age. I beg to differ on my PR blog here:
http://paulseaman.eu/2009/03/the-death-of-journalism-not-likely/
Well for sure there isnt much left for newspaper I wrote an article about it,
http://www.creativedesigns.gr/blog
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