Carolyn Jack
Editor and CEO, Geniocity.comA project of The Genius Group LLC
Creative Nerve
All the news that’s fittest
Newspapers aren’t publishing the news so much as making it these days.
With newspaper companies downsizing, going under or being threatened with closings all over the nation, and Senate subcommittee hearings being held to explore solutions to the newspaper industry’s problems, reporters and editors are suddenly facing the possibility that they and their employers will become the objects of the kind of complex federal policy initiative they’re used to covering from the sidelines.
Not the position most journalists want to be in. But what are our options?
Disgreements about what the market will pay for are keeping industry experts arguing in circles:
If no one wants printed news anymore, why don’t all the papers just go totally online? Because no one’s sure they can make enough money from online ads to support their operations. So why don’t they sell subscriptions, as they did with the print versions? Because some people believe that Web users want their information for free, while some others believe that readers might pay for subscriptions if online news were somehow a better product than print news – which they think it isn’t. So forget that revenue stream. But if news is so vital to our democracy and people don’t want to pay for it directly, why don’t news companies become nonprofits like the Public Broadcasting System and National Public Radio, which are paid for in part by us taxpayers through federal funding? Because that would make newspapers financially beholden to the very governments and politicians they need to cover objectively and rigorously, plus PBS and NPR get jerked around a lot by presidents and their minions who don’t like whatever slant they perceive those nonprofits to have. (See Bush Administration…). So papers need to earn their own money in order to stay editorially (more or less) independent. But no one will buy ads or subscriptions. …
See how it goes? It’s like Frodo and his companions trapped in the Mines of Moria: “We cannot get out. We cannot get out. The end comes.”
So why don’t news operations find some other revenue stream in addition to ads, subscriptions or grants?
Ah. Why indeed? Now we can detect a little light starting to glow from the staff of Gandalf. Another revenue stream might just be the answer and some of us are working on that – new goods and new services to go with the ads and subscriptions. But most newspapers of any size can’t just suddenly branch into selling flavored popcorn or virtual greeting cards - they’re big companies owned by huge corporations. Though they might have the resources to develop and market new products, they can’t easily or quickly retool their complex operations and they’ll need all kinds of time for multilevel approvals and focus groups and other corporate protocols before they can consider launching anything. In the meantime, their business is shriveling.
It may be that only small companies will have the creativity and the flexibility to adapt quickly enough to save themselves and so grow into a new species of news outlet. It could be that the big papers really are doomed, like the dinosaurs that couldn’t survive in a radically changed environment.
I’m prepared for that, intellectually at least. But I don’t believe most people really want to live without regularly updated, factually reliable news about everything in the world - and if the big news organizations die, reliable news will go away not just from doorsteps and drop boxes, but also from TV, radio and the internet. Who do you think supplies news content to those electronic outlets?
I’m also not convinced that ads and subscriptions are dead for all eternity. News does have value – people have simply forgotten that because the good-quality stuff is currently available for free in so many ways. But let the supply of news dry up and people may discover all of a sudden that they’re very happy to pay 75 cents or a dollar a day to find out what their elected officials and power companies and school districts and financial leaders are really doing.
This is an unhappy time for many of us who value good journalism and fear the loss of our best protection against dangerous ignorance and the tyranny to which it might give rise. I hope that “many of us” actually includes everyone in the world. But while all of us in the news business wait and worry, those of us who can also need to experiment, because only the fittest will survive. The trick is figuring out what being “fittest” involves – and fast.
Let the redefining and the new revenue streams begin.
May 15th, 2009 at 3:05 pm
Nicely said.
I personally think many people would be willing to pay a modest subscription fee to access the newspapers in an online format. I know there are many critics of this, but I thought of one solution that came to me from working in software. At Stage Research, where I work part time as a consultant, we give a hefty discount to students on our software. This gets them interested in the software while they are students and leads (hopefully) to future sales as they enter the work force. I think newspapers could do the same thing. Give the news to students for free, get them hooked, and hopefully they will be willing to pay for it later on in life. Yes, that’s an extra hassle because you need to make sure people are students and of course there will be abuse with people who are not really students pretending to be students. But I strongly think it could be done. Do it as 1 year subscriptions, and students get it for free or very cheap. Plus without the costs of printing a physical product and distributing it, I think the price for the paper could actually go down and it’s more “green” to boot, not throwing away tons of paper daily.
I also think the online version of the newspaper needs to improved in order for that to take off. The reason many people turn to the online only news services is because they get how to publish information online better than the traditional newspaper companies do. Improve the newspaper’s web site and I think more people will come. The Plain Dealer’s Cleveland.com web site is a perfect example. I rarely visit it because it’s too cluttered and I rarely find what I’m looking for. I end up having to Google what I want to find and it helps me navigate right to the page on their site I’m looking for.
Lastly I would just say that we are reaping what we’ve sown. By not having any sort of public outcry while the FCC changed rules about how one organization can own more and more newspaper and other broadcasting organizations all in the same market we have allowed these huge media juggernauts to be created, who as you just admitted are too large to change fast enough to keep up with the times. Hmmmm… maybe if we had insisted on much smaller organizations and less consolidation of all our media, they would be quicker to adapt and we would all have been better off.
I feel bad about all the cuts in the news media because I highly value the excellent job our journalists do in collecting the news for us. I hope we as a society can figure something out.
May 15th, 2009 at 8:18 pm
Carolyn, I am one of those who would be delighted to “pay 75 cents or a dollar a day to find out what their elected officials and power companies and school districts and financial leaders are really doing.”
But the Plainly Dealer’s reports on things like power companies and financial leaders are blandly credulous and if there is a negative story, it tends to get buried. As for their coverage of elected officials, they are stupendously biased and hard to take seriously — a couple more good examples ran just this past week, with the misleading hit jobs they did on Jim Rokakis and Rich Cordray.
I love print newspapers and would still subscribe to one, if there was one I felt did honest, just-the-facts investigative reporting, not reporting that cherry-picks facts to back an agenda.
Also, in their slash-and-burn, the PD (and they’re not alone) has chosen to abandon huge swaths of readers — such as those in Cleveland’s arts community — in favour of others — such as sports fans, who are not necessarily the most desirable or loyal newspaper readers. I found Susan Goldberg’s explanation for that — that they base that coverage in part on hits to the website and the number of comments they get — wholly unsatisfactory because A. who comments doesn’t reflect the bulk of the readers, just a sliver of the most opinionated and B. it is almost impossible to find anything on their website except sports which is always right at the top and center of the page. They have a truly terrible website which desperately needs redesign to make content more inaccessible and comment moderation (I get tired of seeing a string of crude ad hominems after Connie Schultz’s mildest and most uncontroversial column.)
By the way, I saw a piece by Steve Pearlstein of the Washington Post, urging Warren Buffett to buy up all the big papers in the country and achieve economies of scale by forming an enormous newspaper mega-conglomerate. Uh — isn’t that partly what got us here? The debt load on that one could easily dwarf what Zell got himself into with the Trib.