Some followups on the melting newspaper meme:
Ryan Tate asks, “I don’t understand why people would want to continue to read national news in print but not local and state news in print. And are you saying that even giveaway local papers like the altweeklies and the Examiner will go away, as well?”
I guess I wasn’t clear. I actually think that most newspapers as we know them — big and small — will vanish. Paper will get more and more expensive, and people won’t want to read a static medium.
I don’t think in the long run that the Times and the Journal will survive in their present form, just that they will survive as institutions — their newsrooms and brands will transition to whatever new devices and media emerge. The locals don’t have the same resources, flexibility or raison d’etre, and I think it’s far less likely that incumbent local papers will cross that gulf.
Ryan writes: “My theory: the ossified incumbent local daily papers may very well die, opening room for some pretty vigorous competition among new, energetic newspapers bundling information in new ways, mostly but not entirely to narrower niche markets.” I agree, with the proviso that the vigorous new competitors are simply not going to be on paper. The cost structure is too high, and as the Net continues to mature and serve more mobile devices better, the idea of delivering these bundles of information on paper is going to look increasingly wasteful and inefficient.
Dave Winer says some very kind things about me (thanks!) but also offers some challenges. Winer argues that efforts to devise new sorts of bundles will “run out” as we move deeper into an era of disintermediation: “What’s under attack is much bigger than newspapers, it’s all forms of aggregation. Aggregation can now be customized, and it can be done by machine… Once we’ve disintermediated the San Francisco Chronicle and NY Times (unlike Scott, I don’t think any news organization is going to escape) the next target is AdSense. No need for a middle-man there either. So it’s the whole notion of value in bundles of information that’s going by the wayside. Bundling is not going to be a way to make a living in the future.”
Dave has a pretty enviable record in this area, so I take his perspective extremely seriously. I hope he’s wrong, because it’s the very concept of bundling that has made it possible, for the past century or more, to support a number of enterprises that are fundamentally not supportable on their own. Sending reporters abroad, conducting months’-long investigations, plowing through mountains of court documents — these cost lots of money, and generally advertisers don’t particularly care for the result.
Certainly, today’s papers haven’t always delivered as much of this costly but valuable work as they could have; many have forfeited their muckraking role. But if we give up on the idea of bundling, or if it simply becomes impossible, then the only kinds of reporting and writing that will survive are those that individual entrepreneurs can find sponsors for, or those done by people who are financially independent or who work for nothing in their spare time. Much great work can be pursued that way, and there is a grand tradition of the gentleman (and woman) muckraker that is being reincarnated in the clothing of today’s citizen journalism movement. Still, if we become unable, for instance, to hand some of the New Yorker’s fashion advertising dollars over to Sy Hersh to tell us what’s really going on inside the Bush administration’s “war on terror,” it will be a big loss.
I’m hopeful that, even as the power of networked software kicks in and the passions of millions of empowered individual publishers ignite, there will still be a place for creative bundling, for good editors to lay bets on unlikely stories and pay for those bets with their winnings from more surefire investments. Doubtless this place will be a diminished one. As I wrote before, the survivors will have to be smarter, work harder, offer better services and insights. But I think, and hope, they’ll still find a niche in the next-generation news ecosystem.
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