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.