Future of newspapers gets new insight

The profession where I spent almost my entire working life has gone through some tough times lately. My layoff four month ago from the company where I had worked for 29 years is just one bit of evidence of the upheaval in the newspaper industry, which has laid off thousands of journalists and other employees and suffered the loss of millions of dollars in advertising revenue. But the gloom and doom of the newspaper industry might finally be abating. The Newspaper Project, which was formed last month, is publicizing the many positives of the newspaper industry, including its essential and unsurpassed role as a provider of useful, indispensable information. The organization formed by former newspaper executives took out an ad recently that spotlights newspapers' value and dominance in the information business.

The organization's argument is that, sure, the newspaper industry is going through a widespread upheaval right now, challenged by new media competitors, a lack of public connectiveness and a declining reading habit, but there is no better source of reliable, accurate and complete information. Online sources, which draw heavily (nearly exclusively) from newspapers' original reporting, can't beat newspapers. Broadcast, which has an advantage in immediacy, can't surpass newspapers' ability to investigate, explain and ferret out the facts. And bloggers (including this one) can't spend the time and money needed to do competent, complete, accurate reporting. Most blogs consist primarily of personal opinions and are no better at providing essential information than "The Daily Show" or "The Colbert Report."

In a recent speech, USA Today editor Ken Paulson called newspapers "the iPod of the 1690s," but he pointed out that the 300-year-old technology still has lots of advantages for 21st century readers: Newspapers have editors who demand attribution from reliable sources; newspapers are fact-checked; newspapers are delivered to your doorstep every day for a price that is less than you'd tip the pizza guy; there are no pop-up ads and no viruses to worry about. What a great product!

When filling in at a Barton College journalism class last week, I engaged in a discussion with students about the future off the profession they were studying. The parents of only a third of these students subscribed to a daily newspaper. The students got much of their news online or from television. I pointed out one often-overlooked advantage of newspapers: serendipity, the pleasure of finding something good that you weren't looking for. Newspapers, which collect news from a variety of places and sources, provide that serendipity, by which readers discover things they had not been interested in before. Online searches find only the specific items being sought; there is no serendipity.

Newspapers' plight (and potential opportunity) also got some attention recently from National Public Radio in a two-part series looking into what might happen if a city's newspaper folded. The second part looked at a potential alternative to the advertising business model newspapers have relied on for centuries. The Atlantic also featured the newspaper industry in an article that suggested that major newspapers, such as the New York Times, might be forced to quit publishing because of declining revenues and high debt, and the end might come within a few short months.

The author of the Atlantic article, Michael Hirschorn, also offers an indictment of the newspaper industry for enabling its own decline by losing its focus on the essential news and information that made newspapers indispensable in the first place. "Under the guise of 'service,'" Hirschorn writes, "The Times has been on a steady march toward temporarily profitable lifestyle fluff. Escapes! Styles! T magazines(s)! For a time, this fluff helped underwrite the foreign bureaus, enterprise reporting and endless five-part Pulitzer Prize aspirants. But it has gradually hollowed out journalism's brand, by making the newspaper feel disposable. The fluff is more fun to read than the loss-leading reports about starvation in Sudan, but it isn't the sort of thing you miss when it's gone."

I have long believed that newspapers were making a mistake in copying the entertainment-oriented broadcast news strategy that aimed for "softer," "happier" news. If newspapers are to survive as print products, they will have to aim for the better-educated, more curious readers, not the lowest-common-denominator of channel-flipping couch potatoes.

The Newspaper Project raises another issue: Perhaps newspapers should be charging for online content, which is now offered for free. Aggregators such as Yahoo! and Google are selling ads beside links to newspaper articles, and newspapers are deriving no revenue from those ads. It has even been suggested that newspapers get an anti-trust exemption that would allow them to collude to set prices for online content. I don't know whether that is the solution or is even politically viable, but I'm glad to see some serious thinking and creative ideas about the future of print news. I know I never want to see the day when I can't sit down with the morning paper and dive into its wonderful variety of content.