Print newspaper warms a cold morning

There was no doubt about the sunrise this morning. The sun reflecting off an ocean of pure white snow made the brightest of days. The icy blanket crunched beneath my feet as I walked out to pick up the morning paper — and was disappointed.

Although the paper was in the driveway early Saturday morning as the snow and sleet were falling, it was missing this morning beneath the bright blue sky and the sparkling white base. I sat down with a cup of coffee, pulled up the N&O Web site on the computer and skimmed over the stories posted there. But it's just not the same. I wanted reading material, not looking material. After seeing no major breaking news, I picked up my coffee cup, retrieved the book I was reading from the bedside table and sank into a comfortable chair to read. After another cup of coffee and a minimalist breakfast, I checked the driveway again and saw what might be the newspaper lying there. It was.

I brought in the paper and sat down to read through each section and flip through the pile of advertising circulars. That exercise consumed what remained of the morning, a relaxing, soothing interlude with NPR's Weekend Edition and then an album of church music on the stereo. Getting out of the neighborhood to get to church seemed like too much of a risk with the temperature in the low 20s, so we opted to stay home and plead forgiveness.

Even though we had power and Internet connectivity, it was the old media — the hefty Sunday paper plopped in the driveway — that made my morning complete. Many a time over the years, I had walked to the nearest newspaper rack to buy a paper when a poorly motivated or skittish carrier failed to deliver. Having the news available online has not changed that motivation to walk a few blocks, if necessary, to hold a freshly printed newspaper in my hands, to spread it out across the breakfast table, to divide it up among family members and to slowly savor its every page with all the enthusiasm reserved for flavorful special weekend coffee. Print newspapers are the best.

Subscriber tax credit could save newspapers

The April 6 issue of The Nation contains an unapologetic proposal to create governmental subsidies to save newspapers. Robert McChesney and John Nichols propose a simple solution to the plight of staggering newspapers: A federal tax credit for the first $200 anyone spends on newspapers subscriptions. McChesney and Nichols propose restrictions that would eliminate many small dailies (a 24-page minimum for each edition and a 50 percent-plus news hole), but their basic idea is sound.

Their fundamental argument is that a free press is a public utility that is essential to democracy. They quote Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black saying "a free press is a condition of a free society," and they point out that the United States has a long history, going back to Jefferson and Madison, of providing support for an independent press through generously favorable postal rates and public notice advertising. The Nation article does not ignore media corporations' fault for the current crisis in the newspaper business. The big media corporations have ignored their public trust to provide relevant, essential information about politics and government, stooping instead to fill their pages and readers' brains with the mush of celebrity gossip. But the rapid decline of newspapers threatens to leave major American cities with no newspaper, and that means no watchdog over local governments, institutions and businesses.

A tax credit for newspaper subscriptions would be a modest subsidy for an indispensable and irreplaceable watchdog. The tax credit would go to subscribers, not the papers, and would thereby prevent any governmental influence over newspaper content. The credit could save struggling existing newspapers and might even encourage new newspapers to compete. Readers could choose their local daily or pick The Washington Post or New York Times instead. My daily newspaper subscription runs far less than $200 a year, but I would guess that most newspapers would quickly raise their subscription rates to ensure subscribers got the maximum tax credit.

Of all the proposals for saving newspapers — charging fees for access to online news, barring news aggregators from linking to newspapers' work, raising subscription rates far above current levels, turning newspapers into nonprofits that beg for funding from readers (the NPR model), seeking subsidies from foundations, etc. — the subscription tax credit seems most sensible and workable.

The Nation's article is long and thorough, but it's worth the time it takes to read it.

Newspaper's closing looks like domino falling

A venerable newspaper has bitten the dust. The Rocky Mountain News published its final edition today after 150 years of publication. The fear is that this is just the first of many dominoes to fall.

The news out of the newspaper business isn't good. Advertising revenue is declining. Fewer people are subscribing. Profits are down. Losses are up. Employment is down sharply, by half in some newsrooms. Americans are losing the reading habit and deceiving themselves into thinking they can keep up with the important news of the day by watching a few minutes of television's entertainment-oriented, shallow newscasts or by searching the Internet for the few topics they find of interest in their insular lives.

The decline of newspapers is a sad day for news junkies and former journalists like me, but it is also a sad day for American democracy. Newspapers are the essential nutrients of democracy. Without them, without the investigative capabilities of a well-funded newsroom, without the broad-ranging array of local, state, national and international news, without the community-building knowledge base of shared experience and concern, democracy is in jeopardy. Thomas Jefferson said, "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free ... it expects what never was and never will be." It is because newspapers provided the free expression and the knowledge that inoculated against ignorance that the Founding Fathers instituted the First Amendment.

A recent New York Times column addresses the importance of newspapers to the success of democracy and the prevention of corruption, both in the United States and around the world.

Despite the danger to society that the financial decline of newspapers portends, Americans, except those who own newspaper stock or depend on newspapers for their paychecks, are blithely ignoring the collapse of fundamental reporting and watchdog journalism.

Readership of news is actually on the increase; it's just that fewer Americans are reading newspapers in print. Internet aggregators are posting links to newspapers' reporting and providing this information free to readers. The aggregators profit from ads on their Web sites, which owe their popularity to the news they provide, but the newspapers receive no added revenue from the eyeballs their efforts attract. If newspapers keep losing ad revenue to Internet aggregators, they soon won't be able to finance the reporting that is as essential to readers as it is to the aggregators.

A variety of solutions have been proposed to solve this dilemma, ranging from charging for access to newspaper Web sites to higher charges for printed newspapers to financing newspapers through philanthropic foundations. I don't know what the solution to this dilemma is, and I don't expect to return to the newspaper business where I spent most of my life, but I do fear for what will happen to society and to democracy if the Rocky Mountain News is just one of many falling dominoes.

Something's missing from online news

Since leaving the newspaper business, I've been reading more news online because I don't have access to the print editions of some newspapers, and I've dropped one of my newspaper subscriptions. Although free online news is seen as the monster devouring newspapers, with one popular news Web site dedicated to proposals to save newspapers, my experience has been that you miss an awful lot by reading news online, even when you're reading from newspaper Web sites.

Online reading has one huge disadvantage: You read only what you're looking for, not what you happen to stumble across. A print newspaper reader usually starts at the front page (OK, in some cases at the Sports front) and reads sequentially through the paper, opening up each page in succession. Some pages contain news the reader is interested in or is searching for. Some contain nothing of interest and are quickly flipped through. Other pages include interesting news that the reader was not anticipating or that he was not aware of. The beauty of a daily newspaper is that these serendipitous moments are informative and enlightening. They broaden our perspectives. They make us better informed on a wider variety of topics. They might even give us insight into ideas or perspectives we've never thought about. Your chances of finding serendipitous moments in an online search are largely nil. The strength of online search engines is that they find what you're looking for. That is also their weakness; sometimes what you're looking for is not what you need to know or what you'll find most interesting.

Online reading also denies readers access to most of the advertising in the newspaper. I've discovered that grocery stores' weekly fliers are available online; I don't have to buy a newspaper (or go to the store) to see what's on sale. But I still prefer to hold the fliers in my hands and compare prices, not flip from one supermarket Web site to another. Ads printed in the paper, known as ROP (run of press) ads, are another missing element in online newspapers. Web sites carry annoying advertisements, but not as many as are in the paper, and these print ads are often informative. And they're less intrusive and annoying than online ads. They announce new products, new businesses, new prices, etc. The Readership Institute has recognized that newspaper readers actually want to see the print ads because they consider them informative and helpful, just as the news stories are.

Surveys indicate more and more people are getting their news from online sources. Too bad. They don't know what they're missing.

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.