More about newspapers and creativity

 Reader Richard Boothroyd has this to say about yesterday’s post:

“I think that is a pretty naive opinion that newspapers are failing because of a lack of passion and creativity. Newspapers/print media are failing because of technology (theirs is old) staffing (too much) overhead, (bloggers have little) and competition.

“The model of the newsprint town crier is not even a good one anymore since the medium is not “Green”. This is a business problem not a passion problem and NO…”when people want something they will pay for it” is just not true. You are looking at the demise of Northern Ohio Live as we speak.”

Well, Mr. Boothroyd, perhaps I didn’t explain myself adequately.

First, I’m not talking simply about newspapers, but about the news industry as a whole. Newspapers are in the deepest and, I fear, most lasting trouble, but none of the media are doing all that well at the moment because of the economy-related plunge in paid advertising and the steady decline in subscriptions. Those industry-wide revenue losses have indeed started killing off publications, the Rocky Mountain News and Northern Ohio Live included.

But even though some of the industry’s financial problems are – like yours and mine – due to world banking problems beyond its control, the root cause of print news’ collapse is most certainly a lack of creativity. Here’s what I mean: People in the newspaper business sensed about 30 years ago that computer communication was the way of the future. They knew they were failing to attract younger readers and that their faithful subscribers were going to die off. But instead of putting those two facts together and working hard to come up with a whole new creative news medium, they made two huge mistakes – they didn’t get serious soon enough about using the Internet and they all threw their energies into the same doomed strategy of trying to jazz up their paper pages with what they hoped was bright, hip, short-attention-span-friendly content that teens and twentysomethings would like.

Ignoring the Internet was catastrophically unimaginative, especially with the cost of newsprint soaring. So was the youth-ifying of their pages, because even though it seemed creative on the surface, it wasn’t - each newspaper basically just copied what the others were trying, including Friday entertainment tabloids, high-school sections, women’s sections (back to the future!!), endless collections of U.S.A. Today-style news briefs and huge photos and illustrations. And to what end? Young people stayed glued to their TVs and Sony Walkmen and VCRs and PCs and iPods.

I’ve worked for five different newspapers over those same 30 years and observed a lot of others and almost no news management in that time demonstrated the foresight and innovative spirit to commit real resources and effort to developing digital news content. Publishers and editors kept saying they couldn’t figure out how to make it pay - and then one day, they woke up and discovered that the electronic toys all the kids liked to play with were, in fact, going to be the new information media for the whole planet and, worse, all their advertising, their lifeblood, had gone over to the Web.   

That was absolutely a failure of passion and creativity, a failure of daring. You can’t sit still in any business, you can’t cover your eyes – if you don’t have the zeal and the imagination to look ahead and change constantly, you’ll find you’ve been left behind. That’s what happened to newspapers and that’s what happened to Cleveland and Detroit and Buffalo and a host of other cities in the Midwest where I live. We can see the results of getting too complacent – and then too scared – to change, all around us here.

With apologies to “When Harry Met Sally,” newspapers are the steel of the early 2000s. Like Big Steel, print on paper will pass away, except for small, boutique publishers of specialty books and magazines, and the news industry will spend the next 30 years trying to leapfrog into a future it could have anticipated and been ready for if it had just had the courage to experiment.  

I have worked in too many newsrooms not to have seen what the political realities were. Real risk-taking - the initiative to create something unique to that paper and that community, something deeply rooted in content of substance and excellence – was discouraged. Managements wanted to try only what seemed to be working someplace else.

So newpapers and magazines and TV and radio stations have become corporatized clones of one another. And like clones of living creatures, they are weak, shortlived versions of the real thing. It’s just worse for the print side of the industry because it has dully clung to an outmoded medium.

Journalistic creativity isn’t just about the writing and the pictures and the design, Mr. Boothroyd. It’s about the business, too.

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.

Creative life after layoff

It’s the wee hours of Tuesday morning as I write this and I suppose I’m keeping a sort of vigil: Today before 9:30 a.m., 27 of my friends and former colleagues at The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, Ohio, will be laid off.

The PD is hardly the only American newspaper to undergo this agony in recent years. Many, from the New York Times on down, have had to let people go, because the daily-paper industry is imploding. But to see the PD finally have to capitulate is terrifying. The Newhouse family, whose Advance Publications chain owns Cleveland’s major daily, vowed years ago that they would not lay their people off. They kept that promise for a long time, relying on hiring freezes, attrition and buyouts (such as the one I took in 2006) to try to reduce their workforce less painfully .

And now even they have had to give in. The already sparse PD staff will show up today and find 27 of their number missing, like overnight battle casualties or victims of epidemic: By their absence they shall be known. 

Because it’s horrifying to watch your industry implode, taking with it the youth and passion you invested in it, as well as the standing and influence you earned through years of hard experience, it’s easy to equate these wrenching job losses with death. I’m sure it will feel like a kind of death to the ones who get that call this morning.

But what they and all of us in the news business need to remember are these two things: Humanity will always need reliable information; and this cataclysm in our industry is the single greatest test of journalists’ creativity that most will face in our lifetime.

Many of us have had to leave these jobs at an advanced age, professionally speaking. It may seem impossible for us to both reinvent ourselves in other types of jobs and regain the rewards and reputations we had already worked so long to deserve. But it’s not impossible and it’s what we have to do, not just for ourselves but for civilization.

That sounds rather grand, but I think most of us career journalists believe deeply in the vital need of a free society for a free press that uncovers both important facts and important truths. We need to tell those stories differently now - online if not on paper, from new perspectives and in a new language whose alphabet includes the most inventive technologies. 

And I think there’s room for all of us who want to try. Geniocity.com is my attempt and I have big plans for it. I hope my friends who find themselves to be former PDers today will grieve as they must, then take a  breath and realize that they have a chance many people never get in later years – a chance for one more creative adventure, to say yes to the unanswered part of themselves and change the world by working for good in a new way.