Joe Menn of the L.A. Times talked to me for his story gauging the dwindling fortunes of the San Francisco Chronicle as a bellwether for the fate of newspapers in the Net era. It’s a good piece, and he quotes me accurately, but as always the quote is a snippet of a much longer discourse. Since my words are now part of this record I’d like to fill in the rest.
I told Joe that the newspapers I grew up loving and that I worked for during the first half of my career represent a model that we’ve taken for granted because it’s had such longevity. But there’s nothing god-given or force-of-nature-like to the shape of their product or business; it’s simply an artifact of history that you could roll together a bundle of disparate information — news reports, stock prices, sports scores, display ads, reviews, classified ads, crossword puzzles and so on — sell it to readers, and make money.
Today that bundle has already fallen apart on the content side: there’s simply no reason for newspapers to publish stock prices, for instance; it’s a practice that will simply disappear over the next few years — it’s sheer tree slaughter. On the business side, it is beginning to fall apart, too. It just makes way more sense to do classified advertising online. And it’s cheaper, too, thanks to Craigslist, the little community (I am proud to have been a subscriber to Craig Newmark’s original mailing list on the Well back in 1994 or 1995 or whenever it was) that turned into a big deal.
The loss of classified revenues doesn’t doom newspapers, by any means. But if classifieds represent — as Menn’s piece says — 27 percent of newspaper revenue, and the newspaper industry is accustomed to a 20 percent profit margin, well, your industry just went from a healthy black to a nasty red.
What should be really alarming for newspaper owners is that the same process that ate their classified income is going to affect their other revenue streams. Just as classifieds went from costly to free, the display advertising will begin to dry up, as youth-seeking national advertisers follow their targets to the online world. And the very core of the newspaper product, the professional news report, is under siege, thanks to a myriad of missteps in the newsrooms and the rise of amateur (in the best sense), free alternatives.
It’s not a happy picture. I still read two newspapers a day, but I’m in the field, and I know there’s no chance my kids will. As Menn’s piece accurately recounts, these changes are rolling through the Bay Area first because we’re the advance guard of the transition from print news to digital delivery.
But what’s happening here will happen everywhere. A handful of large newspapers that perform national and international newsgathering and that serve as “opinion leaders” will survive and prosper, assuming they don’t make gargantuan business goofs: The Times and the Journal, surely; the Washington Post and the LA Times, probably; a handful of others. Local papers will vanish into the ether; there’s no reason for them not to. I love hearing the last-ditch arguments here, like, “Hey, you can’t read your laptop/cellphone/PDA on the subway!” But of course you will, soon enough. (BART is getting wireless as we speak; even the IRT will get there.)
Even as the newspaper industry begins to see the writing on the wall, the news profession and the practice of journalism are engaged in a difficult but valuable process of self-examination and reinvention. Newspapers may wither but people still need to know what’s happening in the world. The old newspaper bundle-of-stuff that supported a thriving industry from the 19th century to the threshold of the 21st is falling apart. The challenge for all of us — most definitely including us at Salon — is to find new bundles-of-stuff that make enough business sense to continue to support the function of full-time professional reporting.
Today, free online alternatives are numerous and often high-quality. But journalists shouldn’t wring their hands — the competition is healthy. It means there’s even less room for the kind of inertia, laziness and sloppiness that our predecessors often got away with, and that a comfortable, long-established, often monopoly business model protected. As always, we have to provide essential work; as never before, we have to be creative about supporting it.
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