The decline and fall of American newspapering has been much in the public eye of late, what with the Motown rags going digital, The New York Times tapping its building for a quarter-mil’ in operating cash, and the Rocky Mountain News and other cage-liners either going on the auction block, shedding staff or both.
Now, James Surowiecki has written in The New Yorker something I have been saying all along, that newspapers’ problems extend beyond inept management and the rise of the Internet — the readership bears plenty of blame, too:
The real problem for newspapers, in other words, isn’t the Internet; it’s us. We want access to everything, we want it now, and we want it for free. That’s a consumer’s dream, but eventually it’s going to collide with reality: if newspapers’ profits vanish, so will their product.
Quite right. “Absolutely Free” was a Zappa song, not a business model. Ass, gas or grass, baby — nobody rides for free. Newspapers and magazines have been slow to realize where we and our money were going, but now that they’ve figured it out, we should expect to start seeing virtual paper boxes popping up in our digital neighborhoods.
So keep a few coins handy. You want to hear the Chrome Plated Megaphone of Destiny delivering its wisdom, you got to give up the em oh en eee why. The alternative is not a good one. Concludes Surowiecki:
For a while now, readers have had the best of both worlds: all the benefits of the old, high-profit regime — intensive reporting, experienced editors, and so on — and the low costs of the new one. But that situation can’t last. Soon enough, we’re going to start getting what we pay for, and we may find out just how little that is.
Late update: Here’s a case in point for you. Despite two wars raging, a new president stepping into the Oval Office and a crumbling economy, newspapers are closing or downsizing their Washington bureaus because they can no longer afford them.
Mad Blog Media 
Patrick – Wake up! Pour yourself another cup of coffee and fix your headline.
Yes, we want it free; but we want it correct. 🙂
We have been watching the decline and fall of intelligent journalism for some time now. Well, those of us in towns serviced by companies like Gannett, etc, have been. It hasn’t been about journalism. The paper has been a product. They might as well have been selling shoes or cans of beans.
What we are seeing now is the acceleration of the process due to the collapse of the economy.
Heck, our home has been happy to pay for good print media, but not for dreck. What does one do? Eventually, I have to have something to start the wood stove or swat the dogs. That means paper with substance.
Ya know what’s worse than the decline of the quality print media? A guy can’t access the Frank Zappa catalog on the on line music sources any more, that’s what! Who ever has the rights to his music seems to have pulled the pin on Rhapsody, Zune, I Tunes etc. Major disappointment.
Boz, it’s true. The Zappa Family Trust has a hammerlock on FZ’s catalog, and I haven’t been able to find any online alternatives. So instead, last time I felt the urge to own some Zappa, I went to our local tunes dealer, Independent Records & Video, and whipped out the plastic. It’s so Web 0.0.
Pandora has some Zappa, if what you want is background music in the Cube Farm.
http://www.pandora.com/
That’s ok. We don’t need news. Jesus Fucking Christ will protect us from all manner of nasty rashes, earthquakes, and fresh flakes.
http://iranianredneck.wordpress.com/
That Surowiecki guy’s pretty smart, but I think he misses the boat on this one. The Marketing MBA in me says that most newspapers are not responding to a technologically-driven paradigm shift in the market.
I’ll use the typical Gannett publication as an example. Their competitive advantage was (note the past tense) that they had the news and served it up in the most convenient delivery system. TV came along, but you had to consume their product according to their schedule (the six o’clock news with Huntley and Brinkley for example). Some people did (my dad glued his ass to the armchair at 6), but more people didn’t, and the Gannett folks were free of significant threat. So along they went, fat and happy, devouring their own young, focusing on the money and losing sight of their competitive advantage. Essentially they were not focusing. USAToday came along and was successful because they beat Gannett on convenience. They threw out the quality reporting because they didn’t see it as an advantage. Gannett responded with similar actions, and we got what we see now, a race to the bottom, where the readers looking for quality reporting (the five w’s) didn’t get it and went away.
Then along came the Internet. It beat Gannett cold on the convenience front. MSN.com updates their stuff about every hour. I can log on anytime and read it. 1am in my PJ’s? No problem. Is this a problem? If I’m Gannett its a mortal threat, because I’ve been competing with low quality product on convenience, and here comes MSN.com with only slightly better quality but vastly better convenience. Yow! If I’m the New York Times, its a threat but not a mortal one. The NYT competes mainly on quality and only to a lesser degree on convenience. The NYT will lose readers, but it won’t kill them. They might even gain readership nationwide as the strong regionals like the Des Moines Register sink.
So what’s a regional paper like the Detroit Free Press to do? Their move onto the Internet is just a cost-cutting measure, and will only buy them time. If I was the owner I’d be asking the management what they’re going to when that runs out.
I think the answer is what we (those of us who read the comments on Patrick’s site) have seen already. Move to compete on quality, and deliver content that the MSN’s of the world can’t or wont. This means better reporting and a fanatical devotion to local news. The mantra for a local or regional newspaper to survive should be “think locally, act locally”. They do that and they’ll gain a core group of customers who will make the time to sit and read it, to find out what’s really going on around them. Leave the national news to wire feeds and the NYT and USA Today, and of course TV and the Internet.
As for Zappa, well call me Grant Petersen, but can’t you just go buy the damn CD’s?
Boy that pretty much nails the finishes the coffin there, Jon. You had me up until the part about supporting your local paper.
See if you are more than willing to support your local rag (which I can’t say that anyone NOT in New York is doing), than go out and support it!! Drop the $$$ in the bucket, pick out the 400 pages of coupons, and read away. Except that as more than a few people here have said they do not do.
Convenience is nice. Logging on in your jammies is nice. But paying less than the cover price ain’t saving people’s jobs. And when the newspaper industry crumbles (or auto industry, or airline industry, or your industry) what ya going to do? Work for free? How ’bout trying that one on for size when Vinnie “No Thumbs” and Guido “Three Fingers” Lombardo come knocking at your door.
Buying time is what we are all doing, Jon. Unfortunately we aren’t all as well off and flush with cash as some, so now we take our years of experience covering local stories and do what with it? Flip burgers? Wrench on Huffys? Move to Pakistan so we can get a job reporting the news for your local paper?
What?
No. The news business is just that: a business. For a long time the convenience of waking up and flipping through newsprint was our daily ritual. Now people tune in, log on and blog. Last time I checked none of that was actual reporting. You know, working a beat, meeting the players, reporting what’s going down, you know “W-O-R-K-I-N-G.” Now what you have at the papers is some dreg that is phoned in from the home office in Mumbai by some dude(tte) whose English is probably not as up to snuff as a third grader’s. Hey but it’s convenient, right? Yep. And it’s cheap too. The perfect storm for the downfall of the American economy in the early 21st century.
Me, I’d rather read the local news in the local paper except they stopped reporting that about two years ago. Right about the time that Britney shaved her head. Front page and back. And all over the net. And probably on Fox, CNN and MSNBC too. That was local right? Maybe if you are in Los Angeles it was. But to the rest of America was that ‘local’ or even ‘news?’ I’d say probably not, but that’s what my local paper was repoting – front page above the fold and back page too. And what was the paper’s excuse for this travisty of newspaper journalism: “People are interested and want to read it.”
Now go and ask yourself how they came to that conclusion. I would be willing to bet that it probably had something to do with the “Most Frequently Searched” function on most web browsers, not in the hard nosed world of traditional print journalism. Nope. Not one iota.
Now as a business plan it would sell a buttload of papers, but is is news? Nope. Nada. Never was, never will be. But it sold papers. And local ones too.
So the James (from the West Coast) solution to saving newspapers is pretty simple really: if you like a paper (local/natinal/international) take the time and $$$ and buy a copy. Because that is the only way you can save them from going under – convenience be damned.
Newspapers have always been mythical figures. Two hundred years ago, “freedom of the press” meant “freedom of those who owned a press to print whatever they wanted.” A hundred years ago, papers were the equivalent of Fox vs. MSNBC — the partisan audience bought the papers who told them what they wanted to hear. News as a product of journalism, with a mission and a responsibility, is a relatively new phenomenon.
But what is not new is that markets change. Salt miners are probably bumming that we no longer pay our mercenaries in their commodity, but they go on. If Thomas Edison had to deal with today’s lobbyists and marketing gurus, the light bulb would have been squashed by the all-powerful candle industry heads.
The consumer is rarely “right” but he always gets the final vote. We are the nation that kept The Love Boat on the air for two decades, that bough Chia Pets, and that today truly believes that if your cell phone is more than fifteen minutes old, you’re a loser. We have in front of us free, fast, and high quality, and we have decided that two out of three ain’t bad.
Now, a guy named Bloomburg made a couple of billion dollars by figuring out that there is a small market for the latest business news. Maybe there are folks out there who still want a quality paper, printed on dead trees, to read each morning, but given how many folks choose the McD’s drive-thru instead of a something out of their own oven this morning (eg, like this: http://trainingtable.blogspot.com/ ), I’m thinking the fast-and-cheap crowd has the numbers on their side. So if someone wants to tap the quality market, they are going to have to be the best and they’re going to have to go national or even global. And along those lines, I’ve heard that the NYT’s online readership has been growing as everyone’s paper copy sales have been declining.
The part that sucks for everyone involved is that there is no guarantee that revenues will remain constant in any market sea change. If every local paper goes belly up and a new version of USA Today emerges (one that actually puts out a decent product), today revenues could be half or less of the prior model. But that’s just the new reality on the ground, and no amount of wishing will change it.
We all must be the change we wish to see in the world. If you want to save your local paper, you have to vote with your wallet. But it’s kind of like trying to save a dying species of bird by walking the streets looking for one with a broken wing that you can nurture back to health. Like Dirty Harry said, a man’s gotta know his limitations.
Jon covers it pretty well There is one aspect of the newspapers and the big bad internet intersection that’s missing.
The early, early days of internet business (before e-commerce) everything was free. In part because the pre-web (remember gopher?) and and early web activity was put together by fans and hobbyists and in part ’cause no one had figured out how to actually securely collect money. The culture was very much “I ain’t paying for it” (it being anything you could down load.
The early news and news like sites got in at this point and it seems the papers never figured out how to transition – via marketing and offering a distinctly valuable product – their customer base into for-fee/subscription services. I am assuming that some level of advertiser support continues in the on-line world of course.
Every year of so the NYT offers me a new, for-fee (I’m a subscriber) enhancement to their product, but it doesn’t seem to ever take off as a success.
So an inability to find and push a for-fee on-line service 5-8 years ago doomed all but teh smallest or niche paper or the really big national papers.
The weekly news magazines may be next, in about 4 years.
Do yo think Grant would like being referenced in the same sentence as CDs? Maybe Victrola recordings.