Breaking The News

I told myself that, this time, I really wasn’t going to blog about it.  As with my recent post on the future of writing, I felt that there is sometimes too much hyperbole about the Web tolling the bell for familiar habits and industries… and that I had done my fair share of furthering the exaggerated panic.  This time, though, is a little different.

Newspapers are dying.

This isn’t particularly breaking news: I remember discussing the topic in 2005 during a French class in Paris.  The competition for French newspapers like Le Monde at that time was coming mostly from the free alternatives that were available on the street and in the Metro.  Several American papers were quick to see this trend, and began to offer a free mini version of their full paper; the Washington Post Express, for example, is popular with commuters in D.C.  Today, however, the newspaper industry’s number one enemy is — surprise surprise — the Internet.  The speed with which readers are moving from getting their news in print to finding it online is bringing the industry’s predicament to a nasty head.

The newspaper as a physical paper product with a price tag on it is sorely out of sync with the era we live in.  We can get similar stories, if not exactly the same ones, for free online.  Print newspaper content is also static (for now), whereas an online news story can be updated, corrected, and expanded in real-time.  The greatest advantages that printed newspapers offer are their portability and their familiarity.  With the surging growth of mobile devices as well as improved network coverage and speed, the first perk is less convincing.  The latter still attracts older readers, but holds little appeal for those born in the last twenty years.

Luckily for newspapers, the headlines for the past few months have been focused on Detroit (it helps, of course, that newspapers control the headlines).  But that’s not to say that significant tremors aren’t shaking the industry.  On December 7th, the New York Times Company announced that it would borrow up to $225 million against its state of the art headquarters in order to protect its cash flow for 2009.  The next day, the Tribune Co. (which owns, among other things, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and the Chicago Cubs) filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.  Sam Zell, chairman and CEO of the company, commented that “factors beyond our control have created a perfect storm — a precipitous decline in revenue and a tough economy coupled with a credit crisis that makes it extremely difficult to support our debt.”

What he doesn’t mention is that digitally-provided news is devouring the sales of physical papers.  The Pew Research Center confirmed as much with its recent report that 40% of surveyed Americans get most of their national and international news from the Web, with only 35% claiming to do so from physical newspapers.  The financial equation is simple: fewer eyes on physical papers means less circulation, and less circulation means less ad revenue.  As Jon Fine reminds us, Tribune is a somewhat special case because of Zell’s ill-fated purchase of the media conglomerate last year that left it straddled with massive debt; if there was any kind of perfect storm, as Zell describes it, then he probably fit the last piece in that puzzle himself.  The credit crisis has certainly expedited things a tad as well, but as the blogs and columns are putting it, the Tribune is the “canary in the coalmine” signaling a systemic decline and gloomy future for the newspaper industry.

Many newspapers are taking steps to reach out to those readers who consume their news online.  In October, the Christian Science Monitor announced that it would begin phasing out its print edition in favor of its website (along with a weekly printed magazine).  Other papers have not been as bold, and are making slow progress.  TechCrunch points to a recent study showing that while most of the top 100 newspapers in the country have incorporated such features as blogs, RSS feeds, video, and reader comments into their websites, they have been slow to expand in areas such as social networking and user-produced content.  Notably, they have also been slow to both provide full RSS feeds (as opposed to summaries or snippets) and to serve ads in those RSS feeds; as TechCrunch puts it bluntly, “That seems like an opportunity, even though most RSS ads are complete garbage and readers hate them.”

To be clear, I’m not saying this transition to online will be easy for newspapers.  Indeed, some probably will not make it.  These companies are weighed down by expensive capital investments and corporate organigrams that cater to printing on dead trees.  The evolution to lightweight, nimble online news will be painful, especially since online advertising isn’t nearly as lucrative as its print counterpart.  Hindsight is 20/20, and many say that the papers should have seen this coming and adapted quicker.  They may be right, they may not be.  Just because the writing is on the wall doesn’t mean it’s easy to react to it.  We’re talking about an industry, a profession, and dozens of companies that must totally reinvent themselves.  That kind of wholesale change is difficult not only because it is expensive, but because it carries a tall emotional cost as well.

The death of physical newspapers does not mean the death of journalism or journalists.  The profession will change dramatically and may shrink considerably, but I think there will always be a place for paid journalists.  Our definition of journalist and journalism will certainly shift.  It would be hard to argue, for example, that TechCrunch is not a professional news organization.  Likewise for the Huffington Post.  They are essentially blogs, yes, but their writers receive press releases, conduct interviews, break exclusive news stories from tipsters, and disclose their conflicts of interest.  They are funded by venture banks and by online advertising.  While we will rightly grieve the passing of a storied and noble medium, we should not confuse journalism with the channels through which it is distributed and consumed.  The way the news is collected, edited, distributed, and consumed will change.  But journalism as a profession, and the “press” as an American institution, will endure.  This is not a tragedy.  This is an opportunity.

Images used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user Cayusa and Inju (with a hat tip to Ezra Klein for finding the second one).