This is personal. I put out my first publication -- using a typewriter and carbon paper filched from my dad's office -- in ninth grade, which means The Streaker's Digest came out in the spring 1974, best I can reconstruct. Over the years I have worked as a writer, as a typesetter, as an editor, as a designer, and as a publisher. I put out my last magazine, barring an unexpected burst of good fortune, with the May-June edition of No Depression. More aptly named than we knew, thirteen years back, and you can see how I still feel about it here. Or in the music issue of the Oxford American.
It is a plaintive wail, and I am not alone. I ran into a photographer at a regional newspaper who told me that, by their reckoning, 6500 newspaper folk had lost their jobs in 2008. This is a drop in the bucket, of course, but it happens to be my bucket, not counting tribal battles between newspaper and magazine folk.
We're all members of the dead tree society now, I suppose.
You will understand, then, why I was intrigued not only by Christoph Newmann's first-rate illustration on p. 48 of the December 22 & 29 New Yorker (and for all y'all who bashed the Obama cover, when they're on, they're on: witness the newest cover), and James Surowiecki's financial/media column, the title of which I have borrowed -- as I shall borrow some of his words -- for this contemplation.
Since his is the financial column, Mr. Surowiecki begins not unreasonably by chronicling the demise of the Tribune company, recently acquired by Sam Zell for $8.2-billion, and even more recently bankrupt. If memory serves, this was Zell's first media purchase. [CORRECTED BAD SPLICE.]
From there, Mr. Surowiecki notes the declining fortunes of the Miami Herald and the San Diego Union-Tribune -- both apparently for sale, presumably to any bidder -- but fails to mention other sad steps taken, such as the new agreement by the Dallas Morning News and the Star-Telegram to share arts critics (because, of course, the arts don't matter; nor does diversity of opinion, but I digress).
While Surowiecki is addressing specifically the woes of daily newspapers, the economics plague magazines of all stripes, as well. To quote:
"There's no mystery as to the source of all the trouble: advertising revenue has dried up. In the third quarter alone, it dropped eighteen percent, or almost two billion dollars, from last year."
We have read, this dreary holiday season, about troubles in Detroit, and have subsequently seen projections that, say, 20 percent of our brick and mortar retailers will follow the Tribune Co. into bankruptcy this year. I have not seen anybody note the connection between print and Detroit, but it is significant: Big Three advertising was, for years, the gold standard, the holy grail of magazine growth. If one grew large enough, one might attract car advertising, lavish and lucrative as it comes. We have noted the closure of a number of auto dealerships since the economy went south in a handbucket and gas went to $4 a gallon (and how much worse off would be be had it stayed at that price?), but think about how many pages of advertising have been lost to local newspapers with the closure of those car dealers.
Here is the sad news about a business I have labored in for my entire adult life (though, again, I'm a magazine guy, not a newspaper man):
Newspaper readership has been slowly dropping for decades -- as a percentage of the population, newspapers have about half as many subscribers as they did four decades ago -- but the Internet helped turn that slow puncture into a blowout.
I'm not sure how to take those numbers; the population has been growing steadily, and I have a guess that the absolute number of newspaper readers has changed far less than that paragraph might suggest. But the point is taken, nevertheless.
Surowiecki continues:
Papers now seem to be the equivalent of the railroads at the start of the twentieth century -- a once-great business eclipsed by a new technology. In a famous 1960 article called "Marketing Myopia," Theodore Levitt held up the railroads as a quintessential example of companies' inability to adapt to changing circumstances. Levitt argued that a focus on products rather than oncustomers led the companies to misunderstand their core business. Had the bosses realized they were in the transportation business, rather than the railroad business, they could have moved into trucking and air transport, rather than letting other companies dominate.
Hmmm. I have a passing acquaintance with the quasi-conspiracy theory notion that the Detroit automakers and their political minions had more than a little to do with the decline of railroads, and of other forms of mass transit.
Permit a small digression back into the music industry, from which I am recently fled. It is certainly true that record labels were unlovable things, in the main, and that they kept most of their signed artists as sharecroppers. (And yet, I knew many good people in that business.) But what has happened with the burst of Zunes and iPods and all the rest is this: The power and money have moved from the recording industry to the hardware industry. Period. Artists are fundamentally no better off than they were, no matter what individual artists with their particular stories may assert. The democratization of the recording industry, to the extent that it has democratized, has simply made most musicians less affluent. Not more. The new paradigm seems like the old paradigm, in which recorded works (78s, originally) were cut for a set fee ($25 a side, say), with no royalties, and then sold by the artists from the stage as a tchachki, with the artists deriving their profits from sales at the door. Now, leaving aside the many legendary stories about crooked club owners and promoters (please, god, may my daughter have even less musical talent than I did!), consider the difficulties today of touring and finding an audience at, say, $4 a gallon gas. And on, and on.
Back to the main point:
Local papers could have been more aggressive in leveraging their brand names to dominate the market for online classifieds, instead of letting Craiglist usurp that market.
Maybe so. The problem with new media is that early adopters pay a heavy price for developing the technology. And having been through several website iterations, each more costly, more cumbersome, and more short-lived than its predecessor, I am not convinced that's a panacea. And, uh, isn't Craigslist free? Honestly, I think eBay has been more damaging, and a better business model, but, again, I digress.
More:
...none of the important aggregation sites, to say nothing of Google News, are run by a paper. Even now, papers often display a "not invented here" mentality, treating their sites as walled gardens, devoid of links to other news outlets. From a print perspective, that's understandable: why would you advertise good work that's being done elsewhere? But it's an approach that makes no sense on the Web.
Well, yeah. Newspapers are in the highly competitive business of gathering news. That is fundamentally different from the business of aggregating the news. (The real question is why the Associated Press didn't make that link, since it IS an aggregator.)
But here's the point, the real point:
The peculiar fact about the current crisis is that even as big papers have become less profitable they've arguably become more popular. [But, see clip above, their readership is down?] The blogosphere, much of which piggybacks on traditional journalism's content, has magnified the reach of newspapers, and although papers now face far more scrutiny, this is a kind of back-handed compliment to their continued relevance. Usually, when an industry runs into the kind of trouble that Levitt was talking about, it's because people are abandoning its products. But people don't use the Times less than they did a decade ago. They use it more. The difference is that today they don't have to pay for it.
It's a funny thing to read H.L. Mencken or A.J. Liebling and realize how many daily newspapers once filled the armchairs of big city readers. Years ago we railed against Joint Operating Agreements, marriage of convenience which allied competing newspapers in the same market so as to keep some theoretical diversity of opinion at work for our democracy. At the time, it seemed likely to me that weekly newspapers -- independent weekly newspapers, as they once were -- would fill the void of local reportage and opinion. Alas, the weeklies have been consolidated by the most venal of the chains which sprang up in the 1990s. Ad densities have risen. Experience has been de-emphasized. Serious, in-depth and/or investigative reporting has become a luxury.
Wired had a whole issue devoted to the proposition that "free" was somehow the inevitable good, and though I read the lead article I never quite figured out how it worked in the real world. I don't think it does.
We value what we pay for in this society. We valued our daily newspaper because our subscription -- though it barely paid for the ink on the page -- was a financial contribution to the gathering of news and sports scores and marriage announcements that made that paper ours. We value the various magazines to which we subscribe for much the same reason, and the economics are roughly the same.
It is argued, here and elsewhere, that all this new media is better. All these new voices are better. That because I am now driven to write for free here, instead of for pay elsewhere, somehow that's a good thing.
The new media doesn't make economic sense. Not if it is to replace the old media. First off, the advertising rates are far too low to support a professional news operation, much less copy-editors, without whom we writers would be revealed as greater fools than we are. Second, the new media magnifies the old media's fascination with big readership numbers.
I need to be careful here; I no longer am an owner of No Depression, which continues as a website. But when we were closing many readers suggested that without our printing bill (and shipping, and all of it) our niche publishing model would be less expensive to maintain online. It is not. What once was paid to a printing operation is now paid to web designers, and in software licenses. That means that even more than in print it is incumbent on web content to drive big numbers. We ran a successful and modestly profitable magazine with a circulation around 30,000. My hunch -- and you're welcome to correct me -- is that one really needs to add another zero to that, to draw hundreds of thousands of eyeballs -- to be profitable online.
And another thing...best I could tell before I ran screaming to the sidelines, the online world has none of the traditional separations between advertising and editorial content. For example...music sites typically link coverage of an artist or an album or whatever to one or more sites where you might buy that music, and receive a kick-back for their trouble. Think about the kinds of incentives that builds in.
While online discourse is wonderful fun, else I'd not be here, it is also immediate. Knee-jerk. It preferences the skills of those who can write quickly, who can access data quickly. It does not preference the analytic skills of experts. That, in the long run, is a danger.
Look...I'm out of a job. I'm not going to get another one, not in that industry. So it goes. But this is the fulcrum of our democracy we're talking about. And as much fun as y'all have bashing mainstream media, you'll miss it when it's gone. We live in an era of huge egos, big dollar lawyers, and massive investments. The news media has to be of comparable size to the businesses it investigates and covers, else it can't do its job. I have no love for large businesses, and hope this coming time will cause most of them to split into smaller and more useful enterprises.
But we have seen during this last administration what danger spins from a White House and a body politic who do not wish for nor listen to the complicated voices of learned experts. We need a muscular and diverse media, and you get what you pay for.