The newspaper industry is decline, perhaps fatally, for five reasons—all interrelated. You probably already know the reasons, but if you wanted to see them all written down in one place, then here you go.
As always, comment is invited. Be sure to take the poll, too!
- The Internet (and to a lesser extent cable and satellite television) has stolen a great deal of market share and the advertising dollars that go with it. This by itself doomed the newspaper industry to an enormous shrinkage, although not to the utter extinction that now seems plausible. This "recession" of the industry has been aggravated by newspapers’ institutional rigidity, an inability to adapt, resulting in their sluggish and often comically out-of-touch efforts to innovate and compete online and, in particular, to capitalize on the rise of the blogosphere.
- Publishers are cutting costs by strangling investigative journalism. The hardest job in, and most expensive part of, a newsroom operation, is its core newsgathering. The news does not report itself. Hard news rarely arrives in the form of press releases, public tips, or previously reported news stories. It has to be found by enterprising, dogged, and well-connected reporters who know how to look, who to contact, and what to ask. It costs money. It takes time. So the publishers are killing it. In place of diverse, hard-hitting, relevant news coverage with broad appeal, newspapers are instead focusing more on three easier, cheaper kinds of news: local coverage, soft news, and news analysis (i.e., opinion). The argument from the newspapers has been that hard news is a niche market anyway, and that soft news has a much broader appeal. Partly true: Hard news is a niche market, yes, and always has been. But people who like soft news, tend to get it from magazines and television shows...not broadsheets. I was on the inside for a while, and the bigwigs there were terribly concerned at their dismal numbers among young readers, and particularly young female readers—precisely the demographic that allegedly comprises the heart and soul of the soft news market. [Update: Note that I did not mean to conflate the soft-hitting news that tends to dominate local news coverage, with local news as a whole. As was pointed out in the comments, local news is as interesting as anything.]
- Publishers are also cutting costs by simply raising the ax and chopping off huge parts of their own journalistic apparatus. I’m not talking just about the hardcore investigative reporting now, but whole desks and divisions. More and more newspapers, except for the very biggest ones, have abandoned investigative reporting, abandoned national and international reporting, abandoned business, labor, science, health, government, and environmental news reporting, and abandoned in-house cartooning and op-ed writing. In place of these, they instead run huge quantities of content regurgitated from the news wire and the syndicates. This causes a viral takeover effect, wherein more and more papers replicate the exact same stories, narrowing the industry’s collective newsworthiness, and giving the national media almost unfettered control of the news cycle narrative, leading journalistic standards to plummet, causing important news to go unreported, and permitting corporate bias to corrupt what little reporting does take place. This strategy of newspapers killing their own core competency is killing the entire newspaper industry from the outside in. The news wire, including such as agencies as the Associated Press, cannot sustain investigative journalism and will be the final death of the newspaper industry as a mainstream, local news source.
- Wall Street is demanding higher profit margins, and faster returns on its investments, than in the past. Most newspapers are controlled by shareholders rather than director-style publishers. At this point in time, many newspapers are still able to break even or generate a small profit. The reason you never hear about it is that these profits, while perfectly satisfactory in the past, are seen today as woefully inadequate by the ever greedier and unrestrained corporatists in the financial sector who think that every last asset in the country should be milked for every drop by the free market.
- Newspapers are trying to jazz up their news coverage with the infotainment concept. This trend has already been undertaken and completed by the national television news media, although niches of real news remain. But the most part, just as you see on televised news, print journalism has resigned itself to a life of journalistic fluff. That’s why you see so many "news" stories about people winning the lottery twice, dogs waking up their humans in a house fire, long-lost wedding rings turning up in garbage bins, and other non-news. Twin to this is the sensational news: petty murders, celebrity scandals, high-speed chases, and other entertaining stories that have no real news value, but seem to attract readers by the boatload. As it happens, newspapers never lived in a golden period of hard news. Many of them were utter rags, right from the beginning of the country. In fact, the sacrosanct American tradition of objective print journalism is relatively recent, limited mostly to America itself, and applies typically just to the big name metropolitan newspapers that have earned their reputation by being unbiased, such as the news desks of the New York Times (which is why you hear Republicans attacking it so often with the charge that it is biased) and the Wall Street Journal. The impartial label, notably, does not apply to the largest newspaper of them all: USA Today. However, what has changed is that the newspapers are trying to pass off their fluff as real news, when it obviously not. This ongoing lie drives away both hard news readers, and fluff lovers. Cultural attitudes have diverged from hard news.
If you put these five trends together, you get a clear understanding of why the newspaper industry is in a freefall. When publishers cut their original reporting and refocus their remaining budgets on soft local news, they render their newspapers irrelevant to anyone outside the local coverage radius, curtailing the opportunity for regional expansion or national significance. They simultaneously drive away readers who want hard news when they pick up the paper—and make not mistake: Niche market or not, there are a lot of people out there who love real news and love to see it in black and white in front of their faces.
Everybody—most damningly the newspaper publishers themselves—seems to have forgotten that print journalism is at its best when it acts as a public service. Truth be told, the newspaper industry has only two unique treasures to offer America: Investigative reporting, and the crossword puzzle. Everything else a newspaper has to offer is already done better someplace else. Newspapers—broadsheet newspapers, devoted to the news—are not, and will never be, vehicles for additional profits by the media conglomerates. Newspapers are not, and will never be, fluff factories, entertainment emporia, or echo chambers. The only thing they can do better than anyone else is investigative reporting, and the only reason they retain this advantage is because televised journalism has fucked itself up so badly that it has all but abandoned any commitment to the news. Newspapers, by the necessities of a calmer and more studied medium, cannot abandon their core business so carelessly. Yet they are doing exactly that, and they are suffering for it.
If you want to blame someone for all of this, blame the media companies who own the newspapers. Blame the shareholders of those companies, who want the world handed to them on a silver platter by next Tuesday, every Tuesday. These people are the bane of every industry they touch, and single-handedly make the case that, while capitalism keeps things going, socialism sets things right, and neither can live while the other survives.
Oops, I’m a plagiarist. But it sounds good! Maybe some newspaper will hire me! Plagiarism, after all, is exactly what the news wires are all about, simply in a legitimized form. Blame the news wires, and blame the idiocy of the publishers and top editors who choose to rely so heavily upon other people’s work to spare themselves some hard work of their own.
Blame also the newspaper publishers and board members who, even when unencumbered by avaricious shareholders and thus in full control of their newspapers—as was the case with the Wall Street Journal until Murdoch took over, and as is still the case with the Seattle Times—will still bow their heads to the conventional wisdom that print journalism in order to thrive must become softer, fluffier, more local, less detailed, more entertaining, and more like television news in general. Blame them for being scared, greedy, soulless, and just plain stupid.
Blame the human condition, too. If we actually preferred hard news delivered without comment by somber anchors in sharp-looking suits, that’s what we’d get. And if we weren’t so eager, as a species, to trade our own souls for a quick buck, the shareholders, publishes, directors, and editors who run the newspapers wouldn’t betray the journalistic ethics which they are supposed to value above all other concerns.
There will always be the need for hard news. The availability of it will wax and wane as the times change. For now, mainstream institutions like the New York Times, BBC News, and the Financial Times will hold on as long as they can. My prediction, however, is that the blogs are the genesis of the next generation of investigative reporting. The blogs have no commitment to a dead-tree philosophy. They do not, as yet, suffer from institutional rigidity, and have yet to develop the conservative greed and gluttony that come from decades of success and respect. What they do have is reach, manpower, and passion. Slowly, they are growing money and connections. What happens next is going to be a branching out of the blogs. Successful blogs like Daily Kos will put more and more money into their own investigative arms, eventually rivaling and then supplanting even the mightiest news organizations of the 20th century. Partnerships and alliances with the old media companies are inevitable. The shareholders will move in and try to stake their claims. The rest will follow like clockwork. And while I don’t think it likely, I wouldn’t be surprised to someday read the scoop on some ambitious blog: "New York Times to stop the press, for good."
[Update -- 7:13 pm PDT]: I wrote this in one of my comments, and wanted to put it up here as a general remark. Indulge me while I end on a philosophical note:
You know what amazes me? When I was at University, I learned so much about campus life, cutting-edge research, and local social progress. When my partner worked on a horse farm, I learned so much about running a farm, and about the psychology and behavior of horses. When I worked at a newspaper, I learned a great deal about how newspapers function, and the state of industry itself. Etc., etc.
The best newspapers always pale in comparison to even the flimsiest firsthand experience. Newspapers give us an insight into the happenings of the world. By nature, they are no substitute for actual, personal experience. What they are, at their best, is a guiding light for those of us who see tremendous worth in keeping abreast of current events.
Any newspaper that wants to survive, will tap into this human need for connectedness and offer coverage that caters not to the sixth-grade intellect in adult clothes, but to the human spirit of curiosity and learning, on whatever topics are of interest to us--and plenty of those that aren't--by the merit of excellence alone.