Why Newspapers Can’t Be Saved, but the News Can

THE Rocky Mountain News is dead. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer will publish its last issue Tuesday. The Detroit Free Press has cut home delivery to three days a week. The Star Tribune in Minneapolis and the Inquirer and Daily News in Philadelphia have all declared bankruptcy.

According to Clay Shirky, this is what a revolution looks like.
"The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing... Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.
And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.
There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie."

Shirky, a well-known Internet observer and analyst, has been writing for some time about the future of newspapers, or rather the lack of one (”2009 is going to be a bloodbath,” he told the Guardian in January).
On Friday night he dropped his latest description of the existential crisis papers face, a long essay (some 2,700 words) that has been much discussed and linked to all weekend.
Shirky notes that newspapers were not blind to the coming of the Internet and he briefly reviews a number of the experiments they have tried to find success online (described in greater detail by Jack Shafer in Slate back in January). But all the experiments have pretty much one thing in common:

The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the ’90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan: "Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!" The details differed, but the core assumption behind all imagined outcomes...was that the organizational form of the newspaper, as a general-purpose vehicle for publishing a variety of news and opinion, was basically sound, and only needed a digital facelift.

Now that newspapers are staring to drop dead, the survivors are rapidly shuffling through these ideas again, desperate to stop the bleeding, "demanding to know ‘If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?’"

Shirky’s answer: “Nothing.”

"Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.
With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem."

Shirky, like many Internet enthusiasts, is future-positive. For him, it’s time to get on with the revolution. Forget about saving newspapers. Instead, experiment with new ways of doing journalism in the digital era.

There is one possible answer to the question "If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did...
Any experiment...designed to provide new models for journalism is going to be an improvement over hiding from the real, especially in a year when, for many papers, the unthinkable future is already in the past.
For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.

Steven Berlin Johnson, another future-positive, also weighed on the fate of newspapers and news on Friday, providing a closer look at the experimentation that Shirky puts so much of faith in.
Johnson’s comments came in a speech he delivered at South by Southwest Interactive, an annual convention for Internet types in Austin. Johnson’s been knocking around the Internet for a while. In 1995, he started FEED, an early online magazine, and was its editor. Three years ago, he launched outside.in, "a hyperlocal news and information service."
Johnson began by noting the explosion of coverage of Apple since the late ’80s, when as a college student he obsessively frequented the campus bookstore on the third week of every month, desperate for the new issue of MacWorld.

In the old days, it might have taken months for details from a John Sculley keynote to make to the College Hill Bookstore; now the lag is seconds, with dozens of people liveblogging every passing phrase from a Jobs speech. There are 8,000-word dissections of each new release of OS X at Ars Technica, written with attention to detail and technical sophistication that far exceeds anything a traditional newspaper would ever attempt. Writers like Jon Gruber or Don Norman regularly post intricate critiques of user interface issues. (I probably read twenty mini-essays about Safari’s new tab design.)

Johnson’s reached for an "ecosystem metaphor" to describe this transformation:

The state of Mac news in 1987 was a barren desert. Today, it is a thriving rain forest. By almost every important standard, the state of Mac news has vastly improved since 1987: there is more volume, diversity, timeliness, and depth.
I think that steady transformation from desert to jungle may be the single most important trend we should be looking at when we talk about the future of news. Not the future of the news industry, or the print newspaper business: the future of news itself.

For Johnson, the path from desert to rain forest is one he sees repeating itself over and over again — when he compares the coverage of the 1992 and 2008 presidential elections, and when he looks at at local blogging over the last few years.

When people talk about the civic damage that a community suffers by losing its newspaper, one of the key things that people point to is the loss of local news coverage. But I suspect in ten years, when we look back at traditional local coverage, it will look much more like MacWorld circa 1987. I adore the City section of the New York Times, but every Sunday when I pick it up, there are only three or four stories in the whole section that I find interesting or relevant to my life – out of probably twenty stories total. And yet every week in my neighborhood there are easily twenty stories that I would be interested in reading: a mugging three blocks from my house; a new deli opening; a house sale; the baseball team at my kid’s school winning a big game. The New York Times can’t cover those things in a print paper not because of some journalistic failing on their part, but rather because the economics are all wrong: there are only a few thousand people potentially interested in those news events, in a city of 8 million people. There are metro area stories that matter to everyone in a city: mayoral races, school cuts, big snowstorms. But most of what we care about in our local experience lives in the long tail. We’ve never thought of it as a failing of the newspaper that its metro section didn’t report on a deli closing, because it wasn’t even conceivable that a big centralized paper could cover an event with such a small radius of interest.
But of course, that’s what the web can do. That’s one of the main reasons we created outside.in, because I found myself waking up in the morning and turning to local Brooklyn bloggers like Brownstoner, who were suddenly covering local news with a granularity that the Times had never attempted. Two years later, there are close to a thousand bloggers writing about Brooklyn: there are multiple blogs devoted to the Atlantic Yards real estate development; dozens following the Brooklyn foodie scene; music blogs, politics blogs, parenting blogs. The Times itself is now launching local Brooklyn blogs, which is great. As we get better at organizing all that content – both by selecting the best of it, and by sorting it geographically – our standards about what constitutes good local coverage are going to improve. We’re going to go through the same evolution that I did from reading two-month-old news in MacWorld, to expecting an instantaneous liveblog of a keynote announcement. Five years from now, if someone gets mugged within a half mile of my house, and I don’t get an email alert about it within three hours, it will be a sign that something is broken.

Source: NYT

Newspapers' supply-and-demand problem (Why you should quit doing what everyone else is)

A lot of bits have been spilled over the apparent absence of a viable business model for news on the Web to replace one that no longer works for print. The ad-supported model doesn't seem to work, but clearly neither do pay walls. There's even talk of micropayments again (hello, 1998!).
I'm no economist, but I think the problem comes down to this: The Internet is a single, efficient market governed by the laws of supply and demand*. Because there's surplus ad inventory online — particularly low-grade inventory — prices are falling. But what if the surplus inventory is largely the result of a glut of duplicative content? Would the problem go away if news organizations simply stopped doing about half of what they do and focused on the stuff nobody else is producing?
Consider a scenario: Newspaper A posts a local scoop to its website. The story is picked up by other news organizations. It's rewritten, repackaged, sent out on wires, and within hours that story or some version of it — sans additional reporting — is on a hundred different websites. Much of this duplication is automatic, but some of it is done by human editors. (See Google News any day for an example of this.) Best-case scenario, a few of those sites actually link back to Newspaper A.
Now let's say most of the duplication stops. Because there are fewer versions of the story, more eyeballs now find their way to the original scoop on Newspaper A's site. Good. But aren't many of these additional eyeballs just single-page, out-of-market visits that have little value to advertisers? Maybe, but if Newspaper A is sticking to its core mission of covering local news, it will be able to deliver an audience that's more cohesive on the whole — and therefore more sellable — than if its content is all over the map.
Those of us who have worked for years in online news remember a time when repackaging news from all over was a large part of what we did. At some point most of us figured out it was a waste of time. But sadly, there's still a lot of duplication going on in mainstream media websites, in part because it's seen as necessary for a newspaper to be a broad and semi-comprehensive sampling of the day's news and information.
Well, no more. You want comprehensive? Go to the BBC.

If newspaper bosses are serious about preserving the kind of journalism that makes newspapers great, here is what they must do right away:

1. Stop wasting time on stuff other people are already doing. This means focus obsessively on local or topical content. The era of the newspaper as bundler of many varieties of content is over. If you cover a community, do nothing that doesn't relate to that community. If you cover a topic, do nothing that doesn't relate to that topic.
2. Stop syndicating valuable content to other websites. Let them link to you. (And for goodness' sake, link out. Do it for the karmic rightness of it all, or do it because it adds significant value to your own content. However you justify it, putting your stuff squarely into the clickstream is essential to staying relevant. You can't just be the endpoint.)
3. Scale back or cancel wire service agreements. They're not helping your online product and they might be stealing value from your own content. I have a lot of respect for The Associated Press and the work that all wire-service journalists do, but I just don't think the AP's ownership structure and funding model make sense anymore. (If Reuters can thrive as a standalone news organization, maybe AP can too. But newspapers can no longer afford to subsidize the creation of content that doesn't benefit them directly.)
Am I saying I think newspapers can increase the value of their content to advertisers simply by reducing inventory, the way OPEC does for oil? No (and we can see how well that strategy's worked for OPEC recently, too). Ad inventory, unlike oil, is not a fungible commodity. This isn't about reducing inventory in general. It's about reducing low-value inventory: all those impressions from random walk-ins who aren't a sellable audience because they have nothing in common.

We talk about the newspaper's unique status as a profit-driven public trust and the threat that ongoing structural changes pose to that fragile duality. But how big does a newspaper actually need to be in order to fill the public service role we ascribe to it? Could the Los Angeles Times effectively and profitably cover Los Angeles with, say, 300 journalists (half its current staffing level)? My guess is it could, if that's all those 300 people did.
I feel for my dedicated and talented industry colleagues who have lost jobs in the U.S., the U.K. and elsewhere. This disruptive event is clearly a painful one for journalists. But if newspapers make smart choices this year, maybe it won't be a crisis for journalism.

Souce: Knight Digital Media

Which Dies First? Demand for Newsprint or Production of Newsprint?

There’s a distinct possibility that what may ultimately kill major newspapers will be totally unrelated to anything electronic. It’s a possiblity that a shortage of newsprint may kill more newspapers than a dramatic shift to online.
* The permanent closure by the end of the first quarter of 2009 of the Grand Falls, Newfoundland and Labrador newsprint mill, representing 205,000 metric tons;
* The permanent closure by the end of 2008 of the Covington, Tennessee paper converting facility, representing 70,000 metric tons of coated grades;
* The immediate idling, until further notice, of the Alabama River newsprint mill, in Alabama, representing 265,000 metric tons;
* On a revolving basis, approximately 20,000 metric tons of monthly newsprint downtime at other facilities across the organization until market conditions improve.
Consumption of newsprint in North America will continue to fall. The Far East consumption of newsprint may increase, but that does nothing to help North American mills. As this develops, machines are being changed over to more profitable higher grades of papers.
At the same time, newspapers are shrinking. Not only are pages getting fewer, they are getting smaller.

A price decrease was just announced.

Normally a good thing when newspaper bottom lines are hurting. But for a business that is totally dependent on one raw material - with absolutely no alternative on the horizon - keeping those suppliers healthy is critical.
Like a the automakers, the newsprint makers are looking to liquidate assets. AbitibiBowater will sell it’s hydro-electric plant, for example, in order to free up cash.
If newspapers aren’t careful, they may save so much newsprint, the manufacturers may decide to cut production even more.
I think this is called a esculating downward spiral. Demand down, raise price, demand declines more, reduce production, raise price, demand falls further…
I only hope that more major metro papers follow the Detroit Free Press model. At least it will free up some newsprint for us little guys.

Source: markvanpatten.com