My first job out of college was reporting for my hometown weekly newspaper, and I spent the next six years as a working journalist - with a slight pause along the way to go to grad school, for journalism. My name doesn't appear in bylines anymore, but my professional life is still wrapped up in the media, so the changes and severe challenges being faced by print publications right now have obviously been of interest.
I made the transition from reporting to media relations in the mid-90s, and since then have watched print outlets confront at least three seismic shifts that rank right up there with telegraph to telephone, horse-drawn carriages to automobiles, candles to electricity.
The first was the move to a 24-hour news cycle. When I was reporting in the late '80s and early '90s, the creation of a newspaper was like a giant wave that grew, gained momentum and then crashed down on a significantly better-informed beach once a day, or once a week, depending on frequency. You came into the office with stories in process, or just in your head, or found them waiting on the assignment desk when you got there, and then went about your job of gathering facts, attending meetings, talking to people and - in most cases - filing the result of all this activity before you went home. The finish line was relatively predictable, it could be pushed to the limits at times, or accelerated on those dreaded days when some production issue or extraordinary occurrence resulted in a declaration of "early deadlines," to the hassled groans of the editorial staff.
Then everything changed, and the ability to publish news on the Web resulted in a true round-the-clock news cycle. The only way static, once-a-day newspapers could compete with online news sources, cable networks, radio stations and e-mail alerts was to put their stories online, and it took newspapers probably a good five to 10 years figuring out how to make that transition. It was like taking a factory with one shift that came to a logical conclusion at a regular interval, resulting in a finished product, and instructing it to start cranking out different forms of that product all day long, with customers stopping by at any time to grab a piece, while still expecting the morning delivery that attracted them to factory in the first place. Never mind that it's a competitive industry and this need for incremental updates and transparency didn't really mesh that well with a core value driver/differentiator, namely scoops.
Eventually, newspapers were able to adapt to the 24-hour news cycle, largely by shifting content and incremental story updates onto Web sites that were available to both subscribers and non-subscribers for free. But, however they got there, the transition to serving up news whenever it broke, while still maintaining the commitment to creating the regularly-scheduled programming, was ultimately achieved.
And then two things happened, one of which was predicted in the J-School classes I sat in more than 15 years ago and another that no one expected. At long last, the "print is dead" prognosticators started to be right, or at least right enough that the businesses built around gathering, publishing and shipping news and information to people started to notice. The shift to online news sources, in myriad forms, actually began to happen, especially among young people who had never subscribed to a print publication and probably never would. And this all-important constituency (the future) has been conditioned to expect online content and services to be provided without cost - call it the Napster effect, or the Google effect, most recently the Hulu effect - but this critical audience inherently expects Web-enabled content and tools to be provided gratis.
While traditional newspapers were struggling to adapt to the changing habits and expectations of its paid subscribers - the other shoe hit the floor, in the form of the most severe economic crisis in decades and the sudden evaporation of advertising dollars. This loss of revenue only exacerbated the steady migration of profitable classified ads (real estate, employment, and others) to online platforms and services. If crisis #1 was forcing print media operations into a systematic and hopefully strategic contraction and retrenching, crisis #2 knocked the buildings down and left those left standing trying to navigate their way out of the rubble.
I wrote for newspapers large and small in my years as a journalist. Under both scenarios, I was the common denominator - a person with a pad and a pen and ability to go out and find a story and some relevant quotes, and bring it all back to a waiting newsroom and, ultimately, the reader. That core function was performed for scrappy weeklies or within the velvet coffins of over-resourced and institutional big-city dailies. And that's part of the problem. Simply put, the trimmings and trappings of the large urban daily are unsustainable, given the harsh realities the industry is facing on several levels.
Go into any major city in America and try to find the location of the hometown paper, more often than not you'll wind up in a large and fancy (if weathered) office building in the center of town, high rent payments or valuable real estate wrapped up in the enterprise and the price/cost equation. Maybe that made sense at one time - easy access to the courts, police or government offices that generated much of the copy - but it doesn't anymore. Especially today, when a savvy reporter with a notebook computer, cell phone and wireless Internet access effectively qualifies as a roving newsroom. Throw in a digital camera and, on occasion, that one individual can knock out the need for a centrally-dispatched photo staff, too.
I'm not suggesting that large preeminent dailies are going to be able to convert entirely to a fleet of one-man-band news gatherers working out of converted motor homes in order to adapt to the current environment, but the machinery that has been created and preserved over many decades does need to move in that direction - already has begun to move, painfully, in that direction. Elaborate and centrally-located big city newsrooms, or enormous suburban installations, simply don't make sense today. There's no need to submit a Freedom of Information request from an address in mid-town Manhattan that has a trendy restaurant in the marble lobby, when one from a much more modest facility serves the same purpose and generates the same response.
But the news isn't all bad, because the inevitable shift from print to online/electronic content distribution does carry with it a potentially life-saving development for the industry, or at least some tangible good news, in the form of lower production costs. I was driving by an enormous New York Times printing facility in Queens a few months ago, a truly gigantic building, rows and rows of 18-wheelers parked outside, can't even imagine the raw materials and machinery employed inside, not to mention the staff - all to work through the night stamping words and images on pieces of paper so they could be loaded into the trucks and shipped to my community, and then handed off to someone tasked with driving by my house around 6 a.m. and throwing the finished product out of a passing car in the general direction of the front door. Intelligent people can differ on the value and tactile benefits of receiving a paper in physical form, but there's no getting around the fact that all of the content that printing plant and resulting chain of events facilitated was available to me, with a few keystrokes and mouse clicks, in the comfort of my own home hours before it ever arrived on my doorstep. With better quality photos on a high-resolution screen, interactivity, the ability to search and share and probably a dozen other benefits I'm not thinking of and one enormous advantage to the newspaper itself - printing and delivery costs that round down to approximately zero.
Efficiencies derived through more limited physical production, as readers increasingly shift to digital distribution, should help to sustain and support the news gathering process, which is really what this is all about - paying for the newsroom. And, by and large, people will agree to pay for the operation of the newsroom, because they want quality journalism, they want information, they want a group of people out there in a position to serve as their eyes and ears, with the freedom to dig where it counts. Whether out of legitimate curiosity or just a desire to sound intelligent and current at the neighborhood cocktail party, there's a reason "did you see that thing in the paper," continues to endure as a conversation starter and bedrock question in our society. And that's not going to change. People are curious, about all sorts of things.
No one knows exactly how this is all going to go, what specific permutations will be attempted or succeed in the broader efforts to save the American newspaper, but there are at least three points that seem likely to play in any solution, as the industry seeks to reinvent itself.
#1, Commitment to localism. Local news is key, and rare, and valued by readers far more than the wire service story about an explosion in Belize. Town, county and even state governments, schools, crime and law enforcement, the new restaurant around the corner and whether or not it's any good, plans to renovate the community park - these are significant threads in the fabric and quality of people's lives, and too often they are ignored, or understaffed. The hometown newspaper (regardless of the size of the hometown) is best positioned to serve as the definitive expert and observer of its own community, an authoritative source of information that is not available from any other outlet in quite the same way, whether in print or online.
When I started this post, the top U.S. headline on Google News has to do with the dedication of a Ronald Reagan statue in Washington, and there were 851 different stories to choose from. The word overkill comes to mind. But coverage of budget cuts in your local school district and the possible impact on the size of the class your child sits in every day? The fate of that abandoned building you drive by on the way to work? Why there isn't a traffic light or stop sign at that intersection where cars keep bumping into each other? Underkill city. Run authoritative wire copy for the review of the new iPod or feature film, and staff the small stuff, in new and novel ways, because that information isn't coming from anywhere else.
#2, Stop giving it away. The evolution of the 24-hour news cycle and belief in the value of Internet eyeballs to advertisers resulted in a near-unanimous decision by newspapers to charge for their content in print and give it away online. Clearly this approach is not working, and whether it's the short-term impact of a dismal advertising market, failure to truly unleash the potential of the technology or fundamental disconnect between allocating precious resources to produce something of value and then slapping a "free" tag on it, it's time for a new approach. There are challenges, as noted above, with getting the Internet generation to pay for anything available online, but it makes more sense to at least try to educate new behaviors than it does to stick with the ostrich routine and pretend the current dynamic is as good as it's going to get.
Print subscribers should have access to a paper's online presence as part of their deal, and online-only customers should be provided a way to pay for access at a discounted rate that reflects the comparatively cost-effective way they are consuming the editorial product. Customers should be allowed to enable RSS readers and other developing consumption vehicles so they can consume the content they've paid for in ways that work for them, and to e-mail live links to individual stories to as many people as they want - call it a limited distribution license - which will enhance the value of a subscription, promote the sense of "community" and serve as viral marketing for the newspaper. No one is going to subscribe to their hometown newspaper because they read one of its stories on Google News, but they sure might if a relative or friend e-mailed them a piece that was particularly valuable or insightful.
#3, Find efficiencies everywhere, but don't cede authority, commitment to quality or editorial structure. Like it or not, the evolution of blogs and Twitter and other online publishing tools means that legitimate newspapers are and will continue to compete for eyeballs with an expanding array of content creators who are sitting in their pajamas at 3 p.m. and munching on cold pizza between the keystrokes. That's the way it is. But there is value in credibility, and the reporter/editor structure has endured for as long as it has because it works, and delivers news and information with a degree of accuracy that is neither expressed nor implied by a lone blogger grabbing a piece of hearsay or crafting a personal opinion and pushing the publish button. Not to take anything away from anyone trying to add their own personal voice to the conversation, but standards are important, and long-developed newspaper brands are meaningful, and strategic evolution must preserve these advantages and bona fides.
This is not in any way intended to minimize the huge disruptions and challenges being faced by newspapers and in newsrooms across the country, or to provide an answer to every pressing challenge. The loss of jobs and resources suffered by print media outlets - including the demise of bedrock daily newspapers like Denver's Rocky Mountain News - has been nothing short of catastrophic. But unlike other industries that faced difficult transitional moments and didn't survive, newspapers (with or without the "paper") will find a way to endure, because news is news, news is valued, and news is needed.
