How newspapers can save themselves
Adrian McDermott
January 12th, 2009
The predicted demise of paid-for print journalism is once again a hot topic, as speculation builds on the future of the NY Times. Pretty much all the US newspapers’ debts have now been given junk status, and the NY Times had been investing so heavily that it is now over $1bn in debt and stands to potentially default on $400m in the coming months, leading The Atlantic to speculate: Virtually all the predictions about the death of old media have assumed a comfortingly long time frame…what if The New York Times goes out of business—like, this May?
An excellent post in Slate points out one major cause of the problem. Newspapers, contrary to popular belief, migrated to the web early and put a lot of resources there. However, they just didn’t quite get its values: From the beginning, newspapers sought to invent the Web in their own image by repurposing the copy, values, and temperament found in their ink-and-paper editions.
A number of newspaper apologists have examined ways of holding back the tide, lamely suggesting curbs or taxes on blogging, but while blogs increase the pressure on journalists to get it right, they don’t undermine journalism and can actually help. Interestingly, in a recent Harvard University Nieman Report on journalists’ experience of blogging, blogging journalists felt they worked more quickly, breaking stories on their blogs before following up online and in print or broadcast. They also write shorter, more tightly edited pieces, not just for blogs but also for print and broadcast.
Many journalists are highly skilled at producing valuable, attractive and accurate news that is highly valued. The problem is not the medium, but the news organizations. In their present form they have to be big, complex businesses. In print, people can’t switch and browse - they buy the paper and need to find coverage of all their interests in it. The business problem is doing this at a profit. John Batelle comments on the inefficiency of newspapers, for example: When I wrote for the LA Times, I often wrote two stories a day. Is the Chronicle pumping out 800 stories a day? Is it breaking all sorts of amazing stories and being a leader in the community with those 400 journalists? Hell no!
And supporting this level of infrastructure is expensive. A lot of advertising revenue has departed for good, and the next couple of years are not going to be kind. Online costs are obviously lower, but the tiny revenue per online user simply can’t support print newspapers in their existing form. And without the resources of their print version, newspapers cannot maintain their web versions properly either! According to GigaOm, who comment that there are 8,400 followers of this topic on Twitter, The destruction of the old business model for news is clear, certain, even inevitable. The model replacing it is fragmented, innovative and frustratingly incomplete.
Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, talked to Fortune magazine to the effect that the news organizations are essential but he wouldn’t buy one even though they could easily afford to because of the lack of a coherent business model. And if it can’t be funded because of these business problems, then that’s a real loss in terms of voices and diversity. And I don’t think bloggers make up the difference. The historic model of investigative journalists in any industry is something that is very fundamental. So the question is, what can you do about this? And a fair statement is, we’re still looking for the right answer.
One possibility is subscription or donation for stories of genuine public interest, as reported by Business Week, on a startup doing just that. So far, Spot.Us has raised nearly $6,000 and published four stories, which have covered locally oriented environmental issues, political campaigns, and energy. But this is a bit of a filler for local news.
The bigger answer is collaboration. If, to be profitable, newspapers need a streamlined online offering, they also need a streamlined print offering that maintains comprehensive, quality coverage. No newspaper can be the best at everything, but they all know someone else who is, so they need to use in-house resources for what is unique and crucial to them and collaboration with others for the rest.
To give an example, for non-business and non-tech news I am fond of The Guardian Online, because it is pretty web-savvy and carries a lot of insight pieces that I enjoy. But the breadth of minute-to-minute coverage is not as good as the BBC’s, and it is not a great news portal, so I use the BBC (unfair competition because of the state subsidy, but the demands of neutrality also sometimes limit their ability to delve into depth) as my first news site and RSS feeds to various others. What I’d like is a portal for the best breaking news worldwide and specialist coverage, plus insight pieces and good UK news. Ideally with widgets so I can customize.
To give one example, I like to follow Test Cricket. If you ask most cricket fans they will tell you that Cricinfo is the site. If The Guardian were to embed a few pages from CricInfo (just to give an example), I’d definitely be a more frequent user. I’d be quite happy have a lot of their content like this and for them to focus on what they are in the top division for. And not only for online news: The point is that the print version could use the same model. There is every reason for The Guardian to have its political reporters and correspondents for home and, to some extent, foreign affairs. But newspaper journalism can’t be the best way to report all of it - science, technology, sports, fashion, literature, you name it. But newspapers are potentially a great way to distribute it, and this could be the key to their survival. I hope so.