The New Yorker on the future of the newspaper
This article has been much discussed of late. I heard about it on last weekend’s This Week in Tech, and a reader e-mailed it to Peter.
It’s a long piece, even for the New Yorker, but here are some choice excerpts to give you a bit of the flavor:
Three centuries after the appearance of Franklin’s Courant, it no longer requires a dystopic imagination to wonder who will have the dubious distinction of publishing America’s last genuine newspaper. Few believe that newspapers in their current printed form will survive. Newspaper companies are losing advertisers, readers, market value, and, in some cases, their sense of mission at a pace that would have been barely imaginable just four years ago.
Until recently, newspapers were accustomed to operating as high-margin monopolies. To own the dominant, or only, newspaper in a mid-sized American city was, for many decades, a kind of license to print money. In the Internet age, however, no one has figured out how to rescue the newspaper in the United States or abroad. Newspapers have created Web sites that benefit from the growth of online advertising, but the sums are not nearly enough to replace the loss in revenue from circulation and print ads.
The Huffington Post’s editorial processes are based on what Peretti has named the “mullet strategy.� (“Business up front, party in the back� is how his trend-spotting site BuzzFeed glosses it.) “User-generated content is all the rage, but most of it totally sucks,� Peretti says. The mullet strategy invites users to “argue and vent on the secondary pages, but professional editors keep the front page looking sharp. The mullet strategy is here to stay, because the best way for Web companies to increase traffic is to let users have control, but the best way to sell advertising is a slick, pretty front page where corporate sponsors can admire their brands.�
And it is true: no Web site spends anything remotely like what the best newspapers do on reporting. Even after the latest round of new cutbacks and buyouts are carried out, the Times will retain a core of more than twelve hundred newsroom employees, or approximately fifty times as many as the Huffington Post. The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times maintain between eight hundred and nine hundred editorial employees each. The Times’ Baghdad bureau alone costs around three million dollars a year to maintain. And while the Huffington Post shares the benefit of these investments, it shoulders none of the costs.
Despite the many failures at newspapers, the vast majority of reporters and editors have devoted years, even decades, to understanding the subjects of their stories. It is hard to name any bloggers who can match the professional expertise, and the reporting, of, for example, the Post ’s Barton Gellman and Dana Priest, or the Times’ Dexter Filkins and Alissa Rubin.
In October, 2005, at an advertisers’ conference in Phoenix, Bill Keller complained that bloggers merely “recycle and chew on the news,� contrasting that with the Times’ emphasis on what he called “a ‘journalism of verification,’ � rather than mere “assertion.�
“Bloggers are not chewing on the news. They are spitting it out,� Arianna Huffington protested in a Huffington Post blog. Like most liberal bloggers, she takes exception to the assumption by so many traditional journalists that their work is superior to that of bloggers when it comes to ferreting out the truth. The ability of bloggers to find the flaws in the mainstream media’s reporting of the Iraq war “highlighted the absurdity of the knee jerk comparison of the relative credibility of the so-called MSM and the blogosphere,� she said, and went on, “In the run-up to the Iraq war, many in the mainstream media, including the New York Times, lost their veneer of unassailable trustworthiness for many readers and viewers, and it became clear that new media sources could be trusted—and indeed are often much quicker at correcting mistakes than old media sources.�
But Huffington fails to address the parasitical relationship that virtually all Internet news sites and blog commentators enjoy with newspapers.
Today, almost all serious newspapers are scrambling to adapt themselves to the technological and community-building opportunities offered by digital news delivery, including individual blogs, video reports, and “chat� opportunities for readers. Some, like the Times and the Post, will likely survive this moment of technological transformation in different form, cutting staff while increasing their depth and presence online. Others will seek to focus themselves locally. Newspaper editors now say that they “get it.� Yet traditional journalists are blinkered by their emotional investment in their Lippmann-like status as insiders. They tend to dismiss not only most blogosphere-based criticisms but also the messy democratic ferment from which these criticisms emanate. The Chicago Tribune recently felt compelled to shut down comment boards on its Web site for all political news stories. Its public editor, Timothy J. McNulty, complained, not without reason, that “the boards were beginning to read like a community of foul-mouthed bigots.�
(That reminds me: The Hesperia Star site will get another subtle upgrade in the next week or so. Most of the improvements will be invisible to readers, but it’ll allow stories like Peter’s recent piece on the opening day for Little League to appear in both the Local News and Sports categories. Incremental improvements, in other words.)
As for the New Yorker piece — and, boy, some of those cartoons aren’t any funnier to me as an adult than they were to me as a kid — it doesn’t really bother me nor, I think, does it bother Peter. Unlike many in journalism, we’re more interested in the “news” aspect of the industry, rather than the “paper.” And like the New Yorker points out, for the most part, it’s not bloggers or the wisdom of the crowd that’s generating news, it’s still mostly professional journalists (especially the Associated Press).
Someone will be needed to report the news. Like a huge number of our readers, I get most of my news online nowadays. I have only the smallest bit of nostalgia for news-on-paper, and with the arrival of the Amazon Kindle, it seems clear to me that some form of digital paper product will really take off in the next five years or so. I’m perfectly OK writing for that; I’ll probably be one of the early adopters, just like I was the first on my block to grab an iPod Touch.
Now, some papers I’ve worked at won’t survive the transition. Some folks I like and respect will likely get taken down with the ship. But the industry itself — and that’s the news generation industry, not the printing industry, which will survive on its own as a separate entity — will go on.
I’m not against the “wisdom of the crowds” model, but there’s still a role for a non-partisan at government meetings that ordinary folks cannot attend, whether because they’re commuting or at home with their families or still at work. Certainly there are ordinary folks who can and will take on that role in some locations, but they’re not everywhere and, without pay, you can’t necessarily count on them to be there every time. I think there’s a role there for a professional to act as the public’s surrogate and to fill in the background of sometimes complex issues that politicians almost all like to claim are more simple than they really are. That’s my job currently and it’s a field I don’t see going away any time soon.
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Did I already give you this – good article on the rag trade in Baltimore from Esquire
Comment by Joel Y — April 15, 2008 @ 18:46