The Future of Newspapers?
August 27th, 2009 | EdWords | 6 Comments
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Today is the six-month anniversary of the last edition of the Rocky Mountain News. I was asked to contribute my thoughts on the future of my profession to a blog series. there will be a live chat today at 3 pm at http://www.savethenews.org/Denverchat . You might want to log on and hear what other former Rocky folks have to say.
When I was a student at the University of Denver, Chancellor Maurice Mitchell shared with me his theory of the evolution of media. He believed that the more intimate medium would inevitably supplant the less. Thus, the extremely portable 35 mm camera led to large format magazines like Life and Look, which replaced the text-based magazines like Colliers. Television, in turn, ruined the large format mags. That conversation took place more than 40 years ago, but I’m convinced Mitchell was right. It took a while, but 24-hour cable news and the internet have taken their toll on newspapers.
Those of us whose careers have been cut short by the demise of the Rocky and the cutbacks at other papers have been justifiably critical of newspaper management for not responding aggressively to the reshaping of the media landscape, but I wonder if we haven’t been a little too harsh. Buggy whip manufacturers may well have seen the end coming when the automobile arrived, but it’s hard to know how they could have saved their industry. The truth is, there’s no way for newspapers to recover the ad revenue lost to other venues, or to reclaim their power with readers who have access to so many other choices.
I find myself wondering how the health care debate would play out if newspapers were still the dominant news source, and equally, whether this country ever would have passed Social Security or Medicare if the shouting heads of cable tv and the insidious disinformation of the internet had been in play then.
The sad truth is that, even if newspapers, with budget cuts, restructuring, and more aggressive use of social networking tools and video, find a way to remain profitable, they have lost forever their pre-eminent position as public persuaders. I’ve seen this coming in my own journalistic niche. When I first joined the Association of Editorial Cartoonists, our annual meetings were attended by senators and congressmen eager to have out ears. We routinely were invited to the White House when we convened in Washington. The men and women in power feared our pens. Now they fear Jon Stewart.
I don’t know what the future holds for our profession. Perhaps the printed word will rise again in triumph. Or maybe the New York Times or the Washington Post or some unexpected player will create a new, hybrid multimedia form of journalism that will have the power newspapers used to wield. And maybe in that mythical medium my caricatures will again make the movers and shakers quake. They’d better hurry. I’m not getting any younger.
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One thing the newspapers never tried in the last 10 years was to tell the truth about our corrupt government. Who knows what would of happened if they tried that.
Fred Flintstone–aptly named, for the prehistoric sensibilities of your comment. Let’s see–our corrupt government. All of it? Federal, state, local, every part of every government? Who knew? I thought we lived in a pretty well-governed place compared to much of the world. Things generally seem to run pretty smoothly, all things considered. And newspapers not telling the truth for ten years. Whoa. You read them all? I seem to recall quite a few stories in lots of newspapers malfeasance at all levels of government, many of them quite revealing of both individual and institutional misconduct. Listen, I’m a major critic of the failure of newspapers to dig deeper and ferret out the truth, but can we at least try to say things that have some bearing on reality?
Sorry for the poor choice of words on my part. You and Kevin are right, telling the truth or reporting the real news wouldn’t of made any difference.
Print newspapers are dead. They are dead because they are obsolete.
I’ll stay away from the keyboard while half asleep from now on.
Thank you for correcting me.
Fred
Oh jeeze Fred, did you forget all about Nixon and Watergate? Newspapers have told the truth about our corrupt government plenty of times, but by and large the public’s so freaking apathetic that nothing ever gets done. Or small stuff gets done, like a particular politician loses their job, and after a bit the corruption returns. It’s not newspapers faults, it’s our fault, the citizens, for not demanding the corruption end and paying attention long enough to ensure it really does.
Back on topic, I think newspapers in their current form are indeed doomed, or at least they’re going to end up a very small niche, which will grow smaller over time as younger people (the ones who grew up with the Internet always there) replace older people (who grew up relying on newspapers for news). But… I don’t think “newspapers” are ultimately doomed, they’ve just got to change. I think once the prices on E Ink displays come down in price, and ebook readers like the Kindle and Sony’s Reader become more widespread, that there’s a huge opportunity for traditional newspaper companies to shift to that. I won’t buy a newspaper, for lots of reasons (the ink rubbing off on my hands is a big one, the bulky size of them is another) but I would be interested in subscribing to a digital edition I got on an ebook reader, if I had one that is. It would solve most of my problems with newspapers (no ink to rub off on me, convenient size, and so on) and with it all digital it should be possible to filter out the stuff I have no interest in at all (like sports) so that the news I get is only the news I want to read.
I believe there’s also a big benefit there for independent journalism. If the big media companies won’t report the real news, SOMEONE will, and I foresee there being aggregators that become de-facto newspapers that one can subscribe to, that pull all their articles from independent journalists. Figuring out how to do that and pay the journalists plus the aggregator (gotta pay for servers/bandwidth somehow) will be the tricky part. But I think overall it’ll improve the quality of the news, because the big media companies will suddenly have to compete with journalists who are beholden to no employer on what they report. And I think editorial cartoons have the same future.
Obviously there’s going to be a transition period, which we appear to already be in with the current newspaper market shrinking, and this transition period won’t be fun for people in the business. But ultimately it’ll end up better for everyone I believe.
Now I just have to figure out the business plan to make all that work and start working to make one of those aggregators happen.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/09/google-developing-a-micropayment-platform-and-pitching-newspapers-open-need-not-mean-free/
Recently read that the newspaper industry spends the bulk of their revenues on buying and transporting wood pulp and only 15% of their budget on journalism. If the medium is the message, the newspapers aren’t about news.