For all the apocalyptic news about newspapers, there’s a distinction worth making: Newspaper owners are far more endangered than the medium itself. Even as they take blow after blow from recession and digital media, newspapers themselves still earn decent profits. They do even better outside big cities, which tend to get all the attention.
Here is a hard cold fact of the Internet age. Any content creator whose sole business is selling their content à la carte will have a hard time surviving. In a world of unlimited digital choice, the cost of creating and marketing content that generates a profit is expensive and difficult. Which is exactly why the successful sites have been aggregators. So what are newspapers to do?
With newspapers croaking right and left, American citizens are justifiably wondering what or who is going to fill the local-paper vacuum. Most companies trying to float new local news models have failed so far. Google boss Tim Armstrong, however, seems to be on the right track with his new company, Patch.
In a period of epic economic crisis, Google, Apple, and Amazon still are doing fine selling advertisements and/or media online. Their dominance over how we get entertainment and information of all kinds is increasingly clear, and the suppliers of that content have to reckon with the fact that the mighty tend to use their power to extract ever more in revenue and influence.
“The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in January 1787. “And were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter.” Today, we are dangerously close to having a government without newspapers.
Metaphorically speaking, Google is killing the newspaper industry. Online news is quickly hollowing out the traditional paper–the Christian Science Monitor eliminates its print edition, Tribune Co. declares bankruptcy, Detroit’s two dailies slash home delivery to three days a week–while Google rakes in advertising profits. Turns out that Google CEO Eric Schmidt professes a passionate desire to lend a hand.
A moment of sympathy, please, for newspapers, whose readers and advertisers have been fleeing at a frightening rate. It would be easy to accuse editors and publishers of being clueless about the coming Internet disruption and to insist that the industry’s proper reward for decades of haughty attitude, bad planning, and incompetence is bankruptcy.
When the Tribune Company announced that it was filing for bankruptcy, last Monday, Sam Zell, the man who bought the company a year ago, for $8.2 billion, said that its problems were the result of a “perfect storm.” You take readers and advertisers who were already migrating away from print, and add a steep recession, and you’ve got serious trouble. What Zell failed to mention was that his acquisition of the company had buried it beneath such a heavy pile of debt that any storm at all would likely have sunk it.
The Christian Science Monitor plans major changes in April 2009 that are expected to make it the first newspaper with a national audience to shift from a daily print format to an online publication that is updated continuously each day.
“You’re fat!” screams the ad. But in an online world of supposedly hyper-targeted advertising it’s hard not to take offense. And offense the Washington Post’s Rachel Beckman takes.
The Boston Globe had a story about the travails of the Portland Press Herald last week, and it included a plaintive and intriguing question from a reader of the struggling, up-for-sale Maine paper: “Can you even be a major city without a daily paper?” We’re going to find out the answer to that before very long, I’m afraid. And it’s worth thinking about what such a city will look like.
When I saw Edward Roussel, head of digital for the Telegraph, on my last trip to London, he said over breakfast that he’d been thinking about my book title’s question — What Would Google Do? — in relation to newspapers and he came up with a radical notion:
Oh joy, another high-profile prognosticator predicting the demise of the American newspaper–and this time the soothsayer is no less than Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. … Well, if Steve Ballmer can so cavalierly predict the end of an industry, so can we. By 2018, there will be no more Microsoft.
For believers in the power of rigorous local coverage to help save newspapers, the Washington Post’s launch of LoudounExtra.com last July was a potentially industry-defining event. It paired a journalistic powerhouse with a dream team of Internet geeks to build a virtual town square for one of Virginia’s and the nation’s most-affluent and fastest-growing counties.
Lots of interesting debate about this week’s Pulitzer Prizes and what they say about the newspaper industry. On Gawker, Nick Denton very smartly says that “the newspapers’ Pulitzer-chasing is most damaging because it distracts newspapers from their real challenge. Rather than impress colleagues with the seriousness of their reporting, U.S. newspapers need to engage a readership that is drifting off to television and the Internet.”
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