1960s visions of the future of newspapers

When I was a student in the School of Journalism at the University of North Carolina, professors and textbooks talked about the future of newspapers with wildly futuristic visions. Some sources proposed newspapers that would be delivered to your house via telephone wires or broadcast frequencies and printed out in your home on some sort of personal printing press. Others envisioned a newspaper that would appear on your television, and you would be able to read the newspaper by sitting in front of the TV.

All these fantasies were widely dismissed by students and professors alike. The public would not want to give up the printed newspaper that had been part of American life for 200 years. How would you divide up the sections of these news platforms with each family members getting to read a section at the time? That home printing press would be expensive and would fill an entire room. Current technologies couldn't possibly handle the abundance of information contained in newspapers to squeeze that info onto a home printing press or a TV screen. The broadcast or wire transmission of this volume of news would clog the air waves and phone lines and make them collapse from the volume.

The traditional printed newspaper, available for hundreds of years, should be good enough for another few hundred years, most everyone thought, perhaps until messages can be transmitted directly to the brain by brain waves or thoughts transmission.

Earlier this week, I decided not to trudge through the rain to the end of the driveway to pick up my copy of the Raleigh newspaper. Instead, I sat comfortably inside, drank my coffee and read the News and Observer online version on my antiquated, first-generation, hand-me-down iPad.

This technology, far superior to anything the textbooks and professors of the 1960s ever dreamed of, is satisfying and near-perfectly replicates the print version of the newspaper. I see each page as it appears in print. I click on a story I want to read, and it enlarges to a comfortable reading size. I tap to turn the pages. I get to see every story that's in the print edition but without getting soaked while walking to the end of the driveway.

This technology and its cousins have given us a parallel means, arguably a better means, of reading the morning newspaper. At the same time, technology has destroyed the business model of traditional newspapers. Classified advertising, which once consumed a dozen or more pages of high-dollar income for newspapers every day, has now retreated to specialty websites that are searchable and cheaper than anything print newspapers could offer.

As a member of the last generation raised on print newspapers, I am often shocked that young people don't feel a need to read a newspaper, in whatever form. Television and the internet, including news sites on that phone in your pocket (I have one of those, too), have made information more accessible but, often, less enlightening and less reliable than traditional newspapers. Younger generations seem less connected to local, national and world events because their exposure to "news" is selective and often slanted.

Journalism professors of the 1960s were wrong about the future of newspapers. The great cataclysm came sooner than expected and in a way no one could have imagined 50 years ago. Many thousands of newspaper jobs, including one I held, have disappeared. No home printing press, no TV newspaper but a different medium has disrupted newspapers, which are still trying to find a means of providing information to the public in a profitable, reliable way.

We refugees from journalism

During a round of introductions at a meeting yesterday, I described myself as "recovering from a 33-year in journalism." In retrospect, I think a better description might be as a refugee from a 33-year career in journalism.

Like residents uprooted from their homes by war or famine, I have been uprooted from the career I chose, enjoyed and thrived in (at least to some degree). Like war refugees, I find myself somewhere else, a place I'd never been before, unable to return to the place — the career — I had known for so long. Like any refugee, I cherish the memories of the good times and try to put aside the pain of the final days of my former life. Despite their longing, refugees have to put the past behind them and channel their energies toward new and different goals, never looking back at what might have been.

Across America, there are many thousands of refugees like me, journalists who worked hard, held responsible positions and enjoyed the adrenaline rush of breaking news and time-absorbing investigations. In the past 10 years, great newspapers have become hollow shells, their newsrooms depopulated as if by a neutron bomb (remember that proposal — it was in the news?) that killed off the workers and left the walls and desks and files behind. During that time, the gradual transition away from printed classified ads and print advertising in general became a waterfall as the advertising revenue base collapsed. At the same time, consumers became so inundated with information that the news in print seemed redundant. Readership and circulation fell.

Publishers, many in a panic, slashed newsroom jobs to compensate for the loss of ad revenue. Eliminating news coverage just turned off the remaining loyal readers who still liked to sit down with a print newspaper and absorb the variety of information included. In some cases, even those newsroom cuts were not enough, and daily newspapers dropped back to semi-weekly publication status or closed their doors entirely.

Thousands of us refugees are among the unemployed and under-employed. Many of us are in our fifth, sixth or seventh decade, when getting hired in a new job is about as likely as getting pregnant. The skills learned in a lifetime in a newsroom are not easily transferable to the few jobs that are in demand in a still-struggling economic environment.

But like a war refugee, I'm not going to harp on "the good old days" that will never come again. We refugees make the best of what we can find.

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.