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.