Local newspapers, blogs and the future

IN today's hyper communicative environment many blogs are like a bowl of popcorn compared with a full restaurant meal.
The idea of blogs and websites that use "crowdsourcing" assumes that eyewitnesses are the best reporters (this is not the case), and that participation is a given from a 'vibrant community' of readers. Sorry, but that's a mistaken assumption. It has been consistently shown that only about 5% to 7% of all readers of any publication (online or in print) will ever send in a letter, newstip or other contribution. Among those, how many have an axe to grind or are otherwise biased? How many of them can provide a photograph better than a snapshot or a video from something more than a cellphone?
The quality of a photograph or video or story matter, precisely because they tell the story better, more succinctly.

Professional journalists don't waste your time
Professional journalists perform a very valuable function in a democratic society. They sift through the information and, when they are good, provide as unbiased a view as possible. That's the job.
Instead of 3000 words about a community council meeting that was 'live blogged' with updates every 7 minutes wouldn't you honestly prefer 300 words that tell you what happened and what was decided?
Do you seriously want to simply be referred to a series of links where you must delve deeply into issues spending hours of time to glean the facts?

Print vs Online Advertising
Newspapers and websites both sell and display advertising. But a website ad is only worth about 10% of what an ad is worth in print.
This is so because print advertising actually WORKS.
You can say more, show more and it is often seen multiple times in the same home or family and kept around. Weekly newspapers have staying power.
Online advertising is often simply ignored, especially small square ads with annoying animation or no useful value driven offer. Worse, some ads appear virtually on their own, adjacent to nothing or so crowded into the tiny space on the edge of a web page that their message is lost. Online ads have their place certainly and can help brand a business but simply showing a logo is not the best way for a business to drive traffic to their store. Online ads are almost always quite small so for that reason alone they can't tell you much. How often do YOU click on an online ad?

Things change and so do people
While it is true that the cost of producing a news product on paper points to a diminishing return, an economic model will emerge that allows good papers to continue to publish over time, as enlightened readers grow weary of the information bombing presented by the blog, and twitter formats and embrace a more measured, thoughtful presentation of what is going on around them.
Real life has a way of asserting itself and people often come to realizations that their time is worth something.

Past is prologue
There are those in the blogging world and those otherwise enamored of online communication for whom newspapers can't die soon enough.
They point to the ability of the internet to deliver news almost instantly (have they heard of radio?), and provide a framework of interaction that allows the audience to become part of the newsgathering process.
This is purported to be 'better' than the 'biased' approach of a seasoned trained journalist who with some experience and judgement sifts through what is often largely unimportant information to deliver a concise report on what matters. There are pluses and minuses to this of course but what many of those who look at newspapers and their current dilemma fail to understand is that there are significant differences between these models of information as well as the potential effectiveness of the advertising the supposedly supports them both.
Predictions about the demise of many things in the past often did not come true. Television did not replace radio, and even in an age of digital downloads, believe it or not vinyl records are seeing a significant resurgence. This is not to say everything will remain the same but people love newspapers for very good reasons. Those reasons will still be why they love them for some time.

Reports of our death are greatly exaggerated
Some daily newspapers whose content is largely duplicated by other media WILL go away. That's clear.
But community newspapers are NOT going to be replaced by neighborhood blogs and are doing quite well though in an economic downturn some evolution is necessary for all media. In the weeks ahead you will see this newspaper change page size for example and we are re-launching our website to bring you more information and provide greater interaction. We think you will like it a lot.
We want to assure you that THIS newspaper is stable and devoted to the community and plans to be publishing in print and online for a long time to come.
We thank you for your readership and the support of our advertisers.
It's our honor and privilege to serve you.

Source: TheWestSeattleHerald.com

Print media are in dire trouble – but blogs are no substitute

The big three car makers are now the focus of attention in the US. The good news is that their incompetence and fecklessness are not being overlooked. The odds of their being saved seem mercifully lower now than before, especially as other industries, facing the same brutal environment, are not sure why they shouldn’t be bailed out as well.

Take the newspaper industry. It has been faltering badly under the pressure of new media for a few years. For much of the past decade, circulation for all papers has been declining at about 2% a year. The last year has been a test case of sorts. Newspapers had the story of a lifetime: an election campaign of historic interest, suspense, drama and personality. From Hillary to Barack, from John Edwards’s love child to Sarah Palin’s Down’s syndrome child, from John McCain’s wild lunges for relevance to the first black president, it was the kind of year in which circulation should have boomed. If you live for a story, this year was an embarrassment of riches.

And yet the decline didn’t just continue. It accelerated.

Between March and September the 500 biggest newspapers in America reported an average circulation decline of 4.6%. In six months. That’s close to a 10% decline per year. No newspapers showed any but fractional gains. It is therefore a near-certainty that many towns and cities in America will no longer have a newspaper after the down-turn. And that may apply not just to small names but to some big ones as well. The Los Angeles Times, for example, has gone from a circulation of 1.1m to 739,000 since the turn of the millennium. Its staff has been halved. Morale has never been lower.

Landmark names – the news equivalent of General Motors, Chrysler and Ford – are increasingly on the chopping block. The Chicago Tribune has seen its weekday circulation collapse by 8% in the past year. The Gannett company, which owns scores of papers, has announced a 10% cut in staff after a 5% reduction earlier this year. The Christian Science Monitor has gone from a daily to a website with a weekly print edition. The Rocky Mountain News is for sale. The profit margins of even the most established papers, such as The Washington Post and The New York Times, are so slim, the future looks extremely dodgy. Some analysts are even predicting that The New York Times will go belly up by the spring.

Declining circulation has been accompanied by sliding advertising. The internet stole most classified advertising from papers long ago. The recession is killing what’s left. The car industry – a big component of newspaper advertising – is in freefall, and department stores are fast fading. There is also a vicious cycle in which the often brutal across-the-board staff cuts and buyouts have removed much of the good-quality reporting that prompts readers to buy newspapers in the first place. And so, as the quality declines, and Google looms, the product increasingly spirals downwards.

What of the web? This was supposed to be the saviour. And, to be fair, the newspaper industry, after a sluggish start, has made great progress. The New York Times website is one of the best and most informative in the world. The Washington Post has added bells, whistles and blogs, blogs, blogs. Only a few years ago journalistic titans were derisive and condescending towards bloggery. Now they are competing to grab a slice of the action.

The problem here, however, is that online advertising, while growing, is not growing fast enough to replace print advertising. It almost certainly will one day, but the distance between the print sinking ship and the online life raft was always perilously long. And now the recession has whipped the waters between into hurricane turbulence. I have a feeling that if and when the storm ends, there will be few ships left and only a few survivors clinging onto small but buoyant dinghies.

The economics of this are brutal. Print and paper and delivery by lorry are immensely cumbersome and expensive compared with a modem – or even with a mobile reading device that you can take on a train or bus in the morning. A single blogger in his bedroom can reach as many readers as a big paper, with no overheads and no staff and no product costs except band-width. That kind of economic competitive advantage is entirely a function of technological change and it is unavoidable.

To give my own example: I started blogging eight years ago. My once quirky blog, born in time to cover the 2000 election campaign, has steadily grown in traffic over the years, but this year, with the election campaign and a media revolution, it went into the stratosphere. In October last year my blog got 3.5m page views; in October this year it had 23m page views. The story of the campaign, in other words, did find a readership (and page views of big online papers soared as well). The growth just didn’t occur in newsprint, and the next generation of readers – those now under 30 – barely knows what a newspaper is.

Now compare my little blog’s traffic with The Baltimore Sun, a big metropolitan paper with a long history and great reputation, featured most recently in the HBO series The Wire. It had 17.5m page views in October; The Dallas Morning News got 12m; The Atlanta Journal-Constitution got 14m. The operation largely run out of my spare room reached many more online readers than some of the biggest and most loss-making papers in the country. The economics are remorseless: as news goes online, the economic model for papers cannot survive. If advertising follows page views, the game will shortly be over.

The terrifying problem is that a one-man blog cannot begin to do the necessary labour-intensive, skilled reporting that a good newspaper sponsors and pioneers. A world in which reporting becomes even more minimal and opinion gets even more vacuous and unending is not a healthy one for a democracy. Perhaps private philanthropists will step in and finance not-for-profit journalistic centres, where investigative and foreign reporting can be invested in and disseminated by blogs and online sites. Maybe reporter-bloggers will start rivalling opinion-mongers such as me and give the whole enterprise some substance. Maybe papers can slim down sufficiently to produce a luxury print issue and a viable online product. There’s always a hunger for news, after all.

Or maybe, as I urged in this space a few years ago, you should take a moment to savour the piece of grubby newsprint in your hands this Sunday. Because it is going to disappear far sooner than most analysts predict.

Source: Times Online