Monday, December 12, 2005

PERMALINK

More on melting papers Some followups on the melting newspaper meme: Ryan Tate asks, "I don't understand why people would want to continue to read national news in print but not local and state news in print. And are you saying that even giveaway local papers like the altweeklies and the Examiner will go away, as well?" I guess I wasn't clear. I actually think that most newspapers as we know them -- big and small -- will vanish. Paper will get more and more expensive, and people won't want to read a static medium. I don't think in the long run that the Times and the Journal will survive in their present form, just that they will survive as institutions -- their newsrooms and brands will transition to whatever new devices and media emerge. The locals don't have the same resources, flexibility or raison d'etre, and I think it's far less likely that incumbent local papers will cross that gulf. Ryan writes: "My theory: the ossified incumbent local daily papers may very well die, opening room for some pretty vigorous competition among new, energetic newspapers bundling information in new ways, mostly but not entirely to narrower niche markets." I agree, with the proviso that the vigorous new competitors are simply not going to be on paper. The cost structure is too high, and as the Net continues to mature and serve more mobile devices better, the idea of delivering these bundles of information on paper is going to look increasingly wasteful and inefficient. Dave Winer says some very kind things about me (thanks!) but also offers some challenges. Winer argues that efforts to devise new sorts of bundles will "run out" as we move deeper into an era of disintermediation: "What's under attack is much bigger than newspapers, it's all forms of aggregation. Aggregation can now be customized, and it can be done by machine... Once we've disintermediated the San Francisco Chronicle and NY Times (unlike Scott, I don't think any news organization is going to escape) the next target is AdSense. No need for a middle-man there either. So it's the whole notion of value in bundles of information that's going by the wayside. Bundling is not going to be a way to make a living in the future." Dave has a pretty enviable record in this area, so I take his perspective extremely seriously. I hope he's wrong, because it's the very concept of bundling that has made it possible, for the past century or more, to support a number of enterprises that are fundamentally not supportable on their own. Sending reporters abroad, conducting months'-long investigations, plowing through mountains of court documents -- these cost lots of money, and generally advertisers don't particularly care for the result. Certainly, today's papers haven't always delivered as much of this costly but valuable work as they could have; many have forfeited their muckraking role. But if we give up on the idea of bundling, or if it simply becomes impossible, then the only kinds of reporting and writing that will survive are those that individual entrepreneurs can find sponsors for, or those done by people who are financially independent or who work for nothing in their spare time. Much great work can be pursued that way, and there is a grand tradition of the gentleman (and woman) muckraker that is being reincarnated in the clothing of today's citizen journalism movement. Still, if we become unable, for instance, to hand some of the New Yorker's fashion advertising dollars over to Sy Hersh to tell us what's really going on inside the Bush administration's "war on terror," it will be a big loss. I'm hopeful that, even as the power of networked software kicks in and the passions of millions of empowered individual publishers ignite, there will still be a place for creative bundling, for good editors to lay bets on unlikely stories and pay for those bets with their winnings from more surefire investments. Doubtless this place will be a diminished one. As I wrote before, the survivors will have to be smarter, work harder, offer better services and insights. But I think, and hope, they'll still find a niche in the next-generation news ecosystem. comment [] 9:39:36 PM | permalink

All that is newspaper melts... Joe Menn of the L.A. Times talked to me for his story gauging the dwindling fortunes of the San Francisco Chronicle as a bellwether for the fate of newspapers in the Net era. It's a good piece, and he quotes me accurately, but as always the quote is a snippet of a much longer discourse. Since my words are now part of this record I'd like to fill in the rest. I told Joe that the newspapers I grew up loving and that I worked for during the first half of my career represent a model that we've taken for granted because it's had such longevity. But there's nothing god-given or force-of-nature-like to the shape of their product or business; it's simply an artifact of history that you could roll together a bundle of disparate information -- news reports, stock prices, sports scores, display ads, reviews, classified ads, crossword puzzles and so on -- sell it to readers, and make money. Today that bundle has already fallen apart on the content side: there's simply no reason for newspapers to publish stock prices, for instance; it's a practice that will simply disappear over the next few years -- it's sheer tree slaughter. On the business side, it is beginning to fall apart, too. It just makes way more sense to do classified advertising online. And it's cheaper, too, thanks to Craigslist, the little community (I am proud to have been a subscriber to Craig Newmark's original mailing list on the Well back in 1994 or 1995 or whenever it was) that turned into a big deal. The loss of classified revenues doesn't doom newspapers, by any means. But if classifieds represent -- as Menn's piece says -- 27 percent of newspaper revenue, and the newspaper industry is accustomed to a 20 percent profit margin, well, your industry just went from a healthy black to a nasty red. What should be really alarming for newspaper owners is that the same process that ate their classified income is going to affect their other revenue streams. Just as classifieds went from costly to free, the display advertising will begin to dry up, as youth-seeking national advertisers follow their targets to the online world. And the very core of the newspaper product, the professional news report, is under siege, thanks to a myriad of missteps in the newsrooms and the rise of amateur (in the best sense), free alternatives. It's not a happy picture. I still read two newspapers a day, but I'm in the field, and I know there's no chance my kids will. As Menn's piece accurately recounts, these changes are rolling through the Bay Area first because we're the advance guard of the transition from print news to digital delivery. But what's happening here will happen everywhere. A handful of large newspapers that perform national and international newsgathering and that serve as "opinion leaders" will survive and prosper, assuming they don't make gargantuan business goofs: The Times and the Journal, surely; the Washington Post and the LA Times, probably; a handful of others. Local papers will vanish into the ether; there's no reason for them not to. I love hearing the last-ditch arguments here, like, "Hey, you can't read your laptop/cellphone/PDA on the subway!" But of course you will, soon enough. (BART is getting wireless as we speak; even the IRT will get there.) Even as the newspaper industry begins to see the writing on the wall, the news profession and the practice of journalism are engaged in a difficult but valuable process of self-examination and reinvention. Newspapers may wither but people still need to know what's happening in the world. The old newspaper bundle-of-stuff that supported a thriving industry from the 19th century to the threshold of the 21st is falling apart. The challenge for all of us -- most definitely including us at Salon -- is to find new bundles-of-stuff that make enough business sense to continue to support the function of full-time professional reporting. Today, free online alternatives are numerous and often high-quality. But journalists shouldn't wring their hands -- the competition is healthy. It means there's even less room for the kind of inertia, laziness and sloppiness that our predecessors often got away with, and that a comfortable, long-established, often monopoly business model protected. As always, we have to provide essential work; as never before, we have to be creative about supporting it. comment [] 10:05:32 AM | permalink