In a nice companion piece for my previous post about television see this article by Michael Hirschorn in the current Atlantic for some reflections on the future for print journalism. It is particularly timely on a day when the headlines are all about a downturn in the lifeblood of broadsheet newspapers – employment advertising.
Hirschorn reflects on the tumult in the American newspaper business – something on which I wrote yesterday. Some key quotes:
The collapse of daily print journalism will mean many things. For those of us old enough to still care about going out on a Sunday morning for our doorstop edition of The Times, it will mean the end of a certain kind of civilized ritual that has defined most of our adult lives. It will also mean the end of a certain kind of quasi-bohemian urban existence for the thousands of smart middle-class writers, journalists, and public intellectuals who have, until now, lived semi-charmed kinds of lives of the mind. And it will seriously damage the press’s ability to serve as a bulwark of democracy. Internet purists may maintain that the Web will throw up a new pro-am class of citizen journalists to fill the void, but for now, at least, there’s no online substitute for institutions that can marshal years of well-developed sourcing and reporting experience—not to mention the resources to, say, send journalists leapfrogging between Mumbai and Islamabad to decode the complexities of the India-Pakistan conflict.
Hirschorn predicts that many newspapers will switch to a web-only distribution model, but the problem is that online readers are nowhere near as profitable as readers of the print edition. At Fairfax, the old reckoning used to be that you needed 100 readers of the online version of the product to make the same money as you could from one reader of the print edition.
More quotes:
“If you’re hearing few howls and seeing little rending of garments over the impending death of institutional, high-quality journalism, it’s because the public at large has been trained to undervalue journalists and journalism. The Internet has done much to encourage lazy news consumption, while virtually eradicating the meaningful distinctions among newspaper brands. The story from Beijing that pops up in my Google alert could have come from anywhere. As news resources are stretched and shared, it can often appear anywhere as well: a Los Angeles Times piece will show up in TheWashington Post, or vice versa.”
And the new business models? Basically a world in which everyone aggregates, and is in turn aggregated.
What would a post-print Times look like? Forced to make a Web-based strategy profitable, a reconstructed Web site could start mixing original reportage with Times-endorsed reporting from other outlets with straight-up aggregation. This would allow The Times to continue to impose its live-from-the-Upper-West-Side brand on the world without having to literally cover every inch of it. In an optimistic scenario, the remaining reporters—now reporters-cum-bloggers, in many cases—could use their considerable savvy to mix their own reporting with that of others, giving us a more integrative, real-time view of the world unencumbered by the inefficiencies of the traditional journalistic form. Times readers might actually end up getting more exposure than they currently do to reporting resources scattered around the globe, and to areas and issues that are difficult to cover in a general-interest publication.
I think this is right. In a very small way, the experience of doing this blog is like this (for a very niche audience, but that too is part of the future). What you are presently reading is a product of me aggregating what the Atlantic has written. My previous post about television is also the result of aggregation. In turn, I predict that within a few hours, other blogs will be linking to what I have said about these pieces of content, and round and round it goes, with each aggregator doing their own little bit of value-adding.
Yet every now and again (well, more often than that I would like to think) I have some REAL NEWS – all to myself. And after six weeks of operation, I know that nothing drives traffic to my site like REAL NEWS. It is REAL NEWS of interest only to a niche audience – ala Sharon Gould and the Quadrant hoax, or Sue Howard and the ABC – but it is still my own original reportage that drives the most traffic to my site.
The hope for future sustainability, in terms of getting paid something like a fair rate for the time it takes me to do this blog, lies, I think, in a combination of aggregating well for my target audience, and breaking REAL NEWS.
The Atlantic Monthly ends on an optimistic note:
“Clearly, over the short run, there would be a culling of the journalistic herd. If 80 percent of The Times staff ends up laid off, many of them won’t find their way to new reporting jobs. But over the long run, a world in which journalism is no longer weighed down by the need to fold an omnibus news product into a larger lifestyle-tastic package might turn out to be one in which actual reportage could make the case for why it matters, and why it might even be worth paying for. The best journalists will survive, and eventually thrive.”
Here’s hoping.
UPDATE: Optimism! Jeff Jarvis in his Guardian column:
“the editor of the Los Angeles Times, Russ Stanton, said the paper’s online advertising revenue is now sufficient to cover the Times’s entire editorial payroll, print and online. “Given where we were five years ago, I don’t think anyone thought that would ever happen,” he said in email. “But that day is here.” The same day has arrived for at least one more major US newspaper. What this tells me is that we are on the cusp of the moment when online revenue could sustain a substantial digital journalistic enterprise without the onerous cost of printing and distribution. Hallelujah.”
UPDATE ii: Gawker says Jarvis has it wrong.
Stanton’s claim doesn’t withstand casual scrutiny for anyone familiar with the economics of online-only publications. The LAT newsroom, even after considerable cuts, still houses 660 people. And yet, in December, according to the newpaper’s own figures, its website only generated 120 million pageviews. At that rate, that’s 2.2 million pageviews per employee per year. One Gawker Media blogger, in a much-cited example, did double that figure in a month.And fishiest of all, Jarvis’s scenario doesn’t include any expense for actually selling those ads. Do Stanton and Jarvis think ads, online or off, get magically sold through the simple grandeur of the wordsmithing to which they’re attached?
Perhaps the Tribune Co., the publisher of the Times, is phenomenally good at running its business, but I doubt that, since it recently filed for bankruptcy. More likely: Stanton is engaging in wishful accounting. And since Stanton’s tale suits Jarvis’s needs, he’s reprinting it without applying a media critic’s needed skepticism.
