It is no secret that newspapers are ailing. Circulation is falling at just about every major paper. Just this month, we lost the Rocky Mountain News, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ceased its print edition. And this week, Senator Bejamin Cardin introduced a bill to help newspapers survive.
It won't work--neither will the efforts of newspapers to revamp their Web pages, cut down the size of the paper, dumb down their coverage, or come up with new schemes for selling and pricing Web advertising. Too many people who want to save newspapers are focusing on saving newspapers as they currently exist. The entire structure of the newspaper industry needs to change, and to finally enter the digital age.
We need to move towards a system with three or four national newspapers, and local papers that focus only on local stories. The journalism profession will shrink, but the public will not be harmed.
First, just a word about me. I studied journalism, and worked at a small daily paper for a year before I realized that it wasn't a good time to be entering the newspaper business. On a wild hair, I went to graduate school in library and information science, did an internship in the news library of NPR, and am now a research librarian at an environmental sciences consulting company. I am essentially a professional Web jockey, working to fully exploit the capabilities of the information superhighway and help others do so, as well. As a lover of both newspapers and the Web, I have given a lot of thought to the predicament of newspapers.
History of the Decline
The decline in circulation began in the fifties with the advent of television. It happened slowly at first; newspaper circulation still grew, but it was not keeping pace with population. In 1990-1991, when 24-hour cable news went mainstream (CNNhad been around since 1980, but it took Baby Jessica and the Gulf War to get people interested), circulation began to fall. Around 2006, when Internet use reached a critical mass, circulation fell off a cliff.
The Problem
And here is the predicament: people are getting their news on the Web. Yet newspapers cannot make money on the Web, because the price of Web advertising is far lower than the cost of print ads, and the prices keep dropping even as more readers get their news through their browsers. Yes, the desire for unrealistic profits by some of the corporations that own these papers contributes to the problem, but it is not the main cause. Efforts to solve the problem by removing the profit motive, as Cardin's bill suggests and as others have suggested, will not address the real problem. There's not enough money to support our current system any more. And creating a bunch of pits that rely on endless philanthropists to come buy and drop in their money.
And what are these pits? Paper after paper with often identical Associated Press stories on the front page, and even more items from the wire inside. Papers that are sometimes CUTTING their local coverage (I was stunned in 2005 when the AJC, which is admittedly a terrible paper, decided not to make any endorsements in municipal races--and barely covered them at all).
We need to let go of our vision of what newspapers used to be, and figure out what they can be. To do that, we need to precisely identify what needs to be saved, and what can be tossed.
What is the Function of Newspapers?
Newspapers, with their ethical code, professional training, and layers of editors, are a public record of what is currently happening. No one is perfect, but they strive to be as unbiased and factual as possible. Newspapers are a giant filtering mechanism, which should ideally produce information that a large majority of people can agree is mostly true. They do not need to represent every opinion, especially not when everyone and my grandma is publishing their opinion on a blog. They need to record what is, both for the present and for posterity.
They are the opening in the discussion; they are can be linked and referenced as the conversation rolls on.
Newspapers also have the duty to shine a light in dark places--to investigate and uncover what the public doesn't know about and should. There are some kinds of investigative reporting that blogs can help out with, but not the kind that involves long hours, travel, access and court battles.
So, RiotLibrarian, after all this ranting, what do you suggest?
First of all, print circulation is going to continue to go down. It's inevitable. Newspapers can't stop it by dumbing down their coverage and having more news stories that are of interest to people who don't read. So as circulation goes down and revenues fall, so should the number of newspapers. And no, it's not a disaster.
Eventually, we need to change to a system that has three to four papers covering national news, and local newspapers that focus exclusively on local stories and events. When a story happens that is heavily local but of national interest (like the Brian Nichols shooting in Atlanta, to think of a local example), national newspapers shouldn't even try to cover it themselves, but license the content for their Web sites and print editions.
And yes, I know some of this already happens. Local papers can move their stories on the AP wire, and they get picked up. If can often be hard to tell whether a story comes from someone who works for the AP or someone who works at a local paper, since it will just say 'AP' if it came of the wire.
But this is archaic. Why do we even need to have an AP, with its own writers? Aren't they just writing the same stories as other people (they're supposed to be unbiased, right? So they're going to be pretty much the same). It used to be that the AP had a monopoly on the distribution mechanism (which is why it is still called 'the wire')--they wrote and moved stories because they were in a position to do so, they had a wire into all the newspapers in the country. But they're not needed anymore. Everyone has wires into everyone else.
Some form of central clearinghouse that manages licensing (so the national papers can grab what they want at a moment's notice) would be helpful, but in a very different form than the current AP.
So what would we have at the other end of this transition? We would have a system where quality stories are being written or edited once or twice, instead of a half a dozen times. Most people would be accessing newspapers on the Web, and checking the national and then the local papers like they currently check the A section then the Metro section. Local newspapers could quit paying attention to presidential politics except when the president comes to down and get back to sitting through city council meetings as is their duty as the fourth estate.
The fact is, this set-up is not only desirable, it is inevitable. But journalists are fighting it like hell because they don't want to see their profession shrink, and they don't want to end the days where entire planeloads of people follow the same guy around, writing the same stories and wasting giant amounts of money.
As the ax falls, I hope they can find new gainful employment and can feed their literary ambitions with some good, well-research blogging. I hope newspapers continue to fill their vital function when they enter the digital age, and no longer involve quite so much paper. And I hope we don't waste too much time and money propping up a industry structure that needs to go the way of the horse and cart.