Is there a thread for the rapid death of the newspaper industry?

i think what's especially endangered is the general-interest paper that wraps everything up in one bundle. nobody needs that when you have online aggregators that you can set to any mix of stuff you want. so i think journalism will continue to move more into niches, which of course has been going on for a while: sports, entertainment, politics, the environment, education, etc. some of those things will generate more traffic and interest than others, which is why some will be able to be commercial for-profit (like tmz.com) and others will probably have to be nonprofit or foundation-driven or something. the most likely arena i think for the continued operation of slimmed-down local news outfits will be local government/crime/schools news, because there will continue to be an interest in that and nobody else is going to do it. so i'd expect to see a lot of local papers turn into websites mostly focusing on those things (probably in partnership with a local tv station, since the newspapers might not be able to fund the operation on their own).

UK national newspapers have misinformed as much (maybe even as gravely) as our government for as long as i can remember

Uh-huh, yes, every single word every paper has ever printed is a lie. Come on: I'd be the last person to pretend that every paper was a bastion of truth, but deliberate misinformation has always been the preserve of the few, thankfully. The point being made eloquently by many others here is simple but key: without the resources of a newsroom behind them, how is any journalist going to be able to hold anything to account, ever?

Better to have a functional journalistic model with a few bad apples than no journalistic model at all, surely?

But that, I fear, is where we're headed. This:

I think we'll figure something out after the 2010s, but it will be roughly a decade before this happens

chimes precisely with my thinking. Shit, eh?

Also, Hurting OTM about focus/quality as the ideal ... but is that likely to happen either? When circulations started really plummeting, almost every UK paper got into a crazy price war or giveaway war in a short-term bid to beat the figures. Nobody did the sensible thing -- to say: "Right, falling circulation goes with the territory here, so let's dig in; let's make this paper a quality product bought by fewer people but with a truly loyal readership base on which we might even be able to build." Nah, they all fucking threw shit DVDs into little plastic bags and hoped for the best.

This isn't revisionism, either: I've been saying this for five fucking years now. Nobody listened. And, of course, it's bloody difficult to consolidate your quality when you're being forced to lay off staff left, right and centre.

Did I say "fucked, totally and utterly"? Oh, yes, I did. Several times.

(I try to kid myself I don't really care, but the sheer volume of swearing in that post surprises even me.)

RIP Ann Arbor News (I lived across the street from this building for two years).

Uh-huh, yes, every single word every paper has ever printed is a lie.

where did i say that? is everything politicans say lies? no. it's a heart over head feeling but they make me just as angry in the end so, honestly, fuck them.

and i'm not advocating 'no journalistic model at all' there btw

We're kinda lucky in the UK that there are so many papers -- they're mostly biased in different ways, so act as a counterbalance on each other. These US cities that have one or two papers at most are screwed if the paper's shite. I can see why so many US posters elsewhere are cheering at their demise

It was hard for them to make pay work while all their competitors were offering free substitutes. The ones that had no or few substitutes -- WSJ, FT -- have made pay work.

They haven't really made pay work - FT.com was a very expensive commercial failure and both have now made the majority of their content free, haven't they?

The pay-subscription model works like a dream in B2B because customers are willing to pay large amounts of money for access to that information. It hasn't really worked in more consumer-orientated financial media, partly because the price of the paper version puts a ceiling on what can actually be charged.

There'll always be a way to get anything for free if it's in digital form.

This is kind of a myth, or at least a half-truth. It's not a matter of whether there's "always a way" to get it, but how hard it is to get. For example you could put everything in a non copy/pastable format, and either restrict the e-mailing and printing or only allow a printing/e-mailing format that includes advertising. I mean there was always a way to get a paper copy for free too if you wanted one bad enough, but most people will only go through so much trouble.

There are lots of pay-for-information schemes over the internet that work just fine. Westlaw and Lexis come to mind -- specialized information organized in a way that is very costly to do and hence cannot easily be done for free.

but text and pictures, in digital form, is one of the easiest things to get generally (more than linear media).

They haven't really made pay work - FT.com was a very expensive commercial failure and both have now made the majority of their content free, haven't they?

I think they've made it "work" in the sense that they've made more money than they estimate they would have from advertising if they made it available for free, which the NY Times failed to do with Connect.

In terms of making it work enough to pay for itself, no they didn't, but I don't think anybody mass-market is going to do that. Too many competing options for advertisers.

These US cities that have one or two papers at most are screwed if the paper's shite.

and to be honest, most of them are pretty bad, and not many are better than mediocre. i worked at a mid-sized corporate-owned daily for a few years, and even though i felt like i did some good work there, and i had lots of friends who also did (several of whom are still plugging away at it), it was an uphill battle against a great corporate complacency. as the only daily in town, the paper had no real incentive to be better than it had to be to attract advertising -- and as the biggest print vehicle in that part of the state, it didn't have to be very good. i found it hugely frustrating, which is why i jumped ship for an alt-weekly after a few years. (ironically but predictably, the alt-weekly is now owned by the same corporate chain that owns the daily. but i left before that happened, and so far the corporate chain has mostly left the alt-weekly alone.)

(that's why i have mixed feelings about the rolling collapse of the daily paper -- it's hard for me to get too worked up about, since so many of them have been weak for so long. but otoh, i know that at all of these places there are some good and smart reporters and editors doing what they can in unfriendly circumstances.)

I was wondering how newpapers benefit from airing podcasts? I listen to a couple of The Guardian's and they're fine (Football Weekly is great). They contain no advertising content, so where are they making their buck? (apart from giving the paper some extra exposure if they're any good i guess).

I guess they're nebulous "brand-building" exercises. I know someone fairly high up at the Guardian - she told me its website and related initiatives don't make money and they never have, and that everyone at the Guardian is running around like headless chickens without a clue what to do next.

Their website is definitely one of the better ones as well.

but they make me just as angry in the end so, honestly, fuck them

...

and i'm not advocating 'no journalistic model at all' there btw

Right. So what are you advocating? A legion of bloggers setting the world to right from their bedrooms armed with nothing more than the weight of their own ill-formed, unedited opinion? Some kind of magic information fairy?

Serious question. You can't dismiss all non-broadcast news-publishing organisations (note how desperately I'm trying to avoid the word "newspaper" itself) -- which, with comments such as "fuck them", you're doing, no? -- on an otherwise very intelligent and well-balanced thread and not offer some suggestion as to what you'd have instead. Text and pictures might be easy enough to come across, but meaningful text? Pictures that tell you something? Who's going to provide them once the surviving newspaper websites have been reduced to two work-experiencers and an RSS feed from the BBC?

Have a read of Ian Jack on Comment is Free:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/21/local-newspapers-under-threat

I think this hits the nail on the head, even if it is a bit misty-eyed and over-romanticised. And I'm guessing you and I will agree on the comment Other than the people who work for them, who could really care if the Daily Star and the Sunday People vanished tomorrow?

(that's why i have mixed feelings about the rolling collapse of the daily paper -- it's hard for me to get too worked up about, since so many of them have been weak for so long. but otoh, i know that at all of these places there are some good and smart reporters and editors doing what they can in unfriendly circumstances

Yes. Absolutely. Blueski, this is exactly it: there's a metric tonne of shit out there but to dismiss everything is spectacularly reductive.

And Tipsy: I'd refer you to the Ian Jack piece I linked above. It won't make you feel any better, but it offers an interesting take on the same argument.

Magic information fairy sounds good I'll go with that cheers.

I mean do you think I'm being spectacularly reductive by never buying a newspaper or spending much time on any of their websites other than when duped into reading some of the Guardian shit linked here? If so fine. Wires are being crossed here, but it's not worth arguing about really.

Yes, because unless you are the only person in the world, and you are right about everything -- which, with the greatest respect in the world, I doubt is true of any of us -- then you can't really expect the rest of society to fall into line with you.

You might not look at newspaper websites but a staggering amount of other people do. So unless you're popping up on this thread just to say "lol dicks talking about journalism" -- which doesn't seem to be the case! -- then, umm: what do you think should be done?

I'm really trying to find out what you think here and all I'm getting is gnomic two-line responses at best. You don't strike me as someone who avoids the news. So: where do you go to get it?

To be honest "avoids the news" isn't all that far off, as bad as that sounds. How else to describe a situation where you never read a paper (unless you're alone in a pub/cafe etc. which is not all that often, or on a bus for a few minutes. I've never been a paper buyer on a regular basis tho) and more recently don't have a TV to catch the news semi-intentionally (I am missing Newsnight a little but otherwise doesn't feel like a great loss). Rarely listen to news radio either. All of which just leaves, yes, the internet and just a handful of news sites i'm forever meaning to expand the range of...so I guess I do expect news for free. I can see how this might be cause for concern but don't feel too bad about disregarding old media entirely because it clearly isn't required in my life (and if that's true for me it can and will be true for many thousands). I'd offer you constructive solutions but don't really have them yet.

Here's my best guess at what the future will look like: most major newsgathering will get consolidated down to just Reuters, AP and one other - they will sell packages to the surviving newspapers, which will all be freesheet or online only, with the exception of one or two high-end "quality" dailies. Newspapers will supplement these news agency packages with local reporting, provided by some combination of traditional reporting/"Web 2.0"/advertising-driven content. Original investigative reporting, if it survives, will survive on TV and in weekly magazines. Some countries, like France, may set up new government-subsidised newspapers or newgathering organisations.

It strikes me that TV news is being somewhat sidelined in this debate when in fact the huge growth of 24hr rolling news over the past few years is surely a massive factor in all this?

rolling tv news, non-pro blogs, etc don't do

- informed opinion
- investigatory journalism

Yeah I'd say the advent of CNN etc was one of the factors dooming newspapers - after all, decline in readership began in the eighties, before the Internet. But the main factor remains advertising, and the impossibility of "monetising" newspaper websites.

were it not immediately distressing, this is a fascinating historical question, the interplay of long- and short-term ish, all kinds of factors, with the recession and ad slump as this sorta unexpected accelerator. "or is it?" will be the question. i think i'm firmly in the "this was inevitable" camp.

wrt british papers and the question of quality, i do reckon it's been very high in the two-odd decades i've been reading them. better, anyway, than in the other era i know well, the 1920s and '30s. i don't think the quality of the writing has much to do with the survival of the format.

a more optimistic view from steven johnson.

i think he's got a point but he's incredibly blasé about investigative reporting when there's maybe two alternative models in the usa (center for public integrity and propublica) and none in the uk (especially with a post-hutton bbc). i've got no faith in tv news keeping this alive when they've got their own revenue problems.

Toynbee's tuppence

seems to be no real sympathy from the commenters

There never is. I think most people don't realise that the vast majority of news comes from newspapers. It's like a river: it starts small with local newspapers, builds into dailies and ends up as the hose of the internet. But when it's all choked off upstream, everything that depends on it is fucked as well.

otoh this is some idealistic shit, tbh. A lot of local newspapers have been little more than money-making aw-look-a-baby-was-born shite for a long time.

my local newspaper (the cambeidge evening news) is pretty dire. otoh it's where alan rusbridger more like rubbishger learn how to be a journalist. (and peter bradshaw, probably not coincidentally learnt to be... well, whatever he is.) so this is maybe an important part of the media ecology being killed off.

The bottom line is that any model of journalism that hinges on (1) printing stuff on paper or (2) want ads is eventually going to die, and while it will be sad that this will soon be going away, and while it may be a disaster in some respects in the short-term insofar as investigative journalism is concerned, we need to continue to work to find a model of journalism that can be supported in the modern era, and dreaming that this problem might go away if we turned off the Internet or shut down Craigslist or ... isn't going to actually solve the problem.

Also, did anyone post this article about the Austin Chronicle? Pretty interesting, I thought:

http://tinyurl.com/d4z4al

any model of journalism that hinges on (1) printing stuff on paper or (2) want ads is eventually going to die,

so OTM. let's not confuse form with content people.

The Pittsburgh post-gazette cold called this morning touting for a subscription. I can get it weekdays for free in school, she persevered and said why not take it on sunday only 'for the coupons'. The local news is fine but the national and international is light dusting of AP and NYT articles. Possibly a more sustainable model is for a national newspaper, the NYT, which a locally produced local section produced by the rump of local journalists left. Italy is more or less like this although in some areas the local section is a local paper sold as a bundle deal.

Senator Cardin introduces bill to allow newspapers to operate as nonprofits

cant imagine any big papers would be willing to give up the ability to endorse

Newspapers need competition otherwise they go to shit: it's always cheaper to do press release rehashing than proper investigative stuff. That's (one of) the problems with UK local papers and US city ones, which makes me sceptical of the whole non-profit or local-section ideas.

so OTM. let's not confuse form with content people

I don't think anyone on this thread is. The Clay Shirky quote cited upthread says it all: "Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism."

But as Stet points out: where does that journalism come from when all the newsrooms are gone?

Blueski's comment:

(I) don't feel too bad about disregarding old media entirely because it clearly isn't required in my life (and if that's true for me it can and will be true for many thousands)

nails it: there was a time when a newspaper really was "required" by anyone who wanted to have even the vaguest idea about what was going on. Those days are long, long gone. But -- tragically -- this next bit:

I'd offer you constructive solutions but don't really have them yet

is as applicable to the entire fucking industry as it is to, er, one ILX0r. At the moment there's an abundance of content but that is going to disappear very fucking quickly, as Zelda Zonk suggests.

dreaming that this problem might go away if we turned off the Internet or shut down Craigslist or ... isn't going to actually solve the problem

Yes. Sadly, there's been an awful lot of that kind of moaning in newsrooms worldwide for the past decade; as you say, it totally missed the point.

The only thing that can happen now is for (certain) newspapers and broadcasters to stop living in denial and start working together -- yes! Together! -- to work out how the fuck journalism survives.

What the Internet has generally done in other information industries is massively consolidate until you end up with monopolies or duopolies. In theory, you could have dozens of competing search engines (and you did in the early days); in practice, there's Google. There's YouTube, there's Facebook, there's Wikipedia etc.: just one or two main providers for each segment. I can only imagine news content will go the same way in the end - there will be just two or three main content providers who will feed the news to newspapers/websites. The newspaper/website's job will no longer be to provide the news, but to shape it and add the local colour.

running a newspaper isn't exactly like those things. you do it partly for political influence, or for... well, who knows what satisfies a conrad black or a rupert murdoch, but they aren't regular silicon valley-type guys. newspapers often lose money, after all.

Not local papers - they're pretty strictly profit-generating machines.

The newspaper/website's job will no longer be to provide the news, but to shape it and add the local colour.

I see it the other way around, mostly. The model of the "website that you visit", once integral to the way we conceived the web, is slipping. You hear people talk about so-and-so's "Twitter page" and it's a sure sign that they don't really use Twitter, or get it. I don't think people will visit a local newspaper's website to get the locally coloured news in the future.

The Guardian launching Open Platform is an interesting development in providing syndicated content with some kind of commercial underpinning (it's not fully open as it "requires partners to carry its advertising as part of its terms and conditions").

The business model of the newspaper is probably even now more robust than the business model of YouTube/Twitter/Facebook but everyone concerned seems to be hoping the issue of monetising them just goes away as well.

Twitter introduces text ads

xpost
I agree, that's an interesting development. And yeah, maybe we won't be visiting websites, maybe news will be delivered in other ways. But I think the massive consolidation will nonetheless happen and you'll end up with very few agencies actually providing the news, however they provide it.

The business model of the newspaper is probably even now more robust than the business model of YouTube/Twitter/Facebook but everyone concerned seems to be hoping the issue of monetising them just goes away as well.

Google makes a lot of money, doesn't it? And yet not so long ago people were scratching their heads as to how a search engine could be a viable business model. I guess the answer is: be the only one, have a captive audience, benefit from economies of scale. And that's going to be the answer for a lot of these. The brand that becomes "the only one" globally will eventually make moeny whatever it does.

One thing I'm keen on is filtered news and increased customisation of content deliverance. It's not the best example but let's say I wanted to 'killfile' all headline mention of a certain celebrity or subject from a feed or website. Could be interesting - difficult to implement because there is obviously much overlap between stories and subjects but this is where the power of online news really lies - more of an exchange between provider and reader (not just thru 'having your say' and whatnot).

wonder if political reporting/comment will go the same way as financial news: would not be surprised, but how it'll play out idk.

The politics blogosphere (hate that word, but it can be useful) might work against that IMO.

i think the key players, ie the ones with real connections, in the 'sphere are ppl who earn their irl wages as hacks. if that goes tits up i don't see them providing content for nish-all.