Press One for News(paper) Emergency

Imagine you'd left the planet some time just before the election and just returned. You'd find that suddenly someone's sounded a Press Emergency! First, it was Sarkozy calling his people to rally 'round the failing press - aux barricades, mes frères. Now, though, it's serious.

Time Magazine certified the emergency with Walter Isaacson's "How to Save Your Newspaper." The newspaper pictured below that catchy headline was The New York Times. And that tells us a lot about the siren call of emergency we're hearing. The Power Corridor, from Boston to D.C., has woken up to the fact that daily newspapers are dying out. Maybe they've been distracted by the all-consuming 2008 Presidential campaign or the financial smackdown we've been experiencing.

Yes, the news(paper) industry is in a world of hurt, but it's hardly a new 2009 development. That said, everyone's jumping in the act. Stephen Brill is giving the New York Times the benefit of his paid content experience, through "secret" memoranda. The New York Times itself offered six writers some digital space to opine on the question of "Battle Plans for Newspapers." Micropayments are again being raised and satirized. It's all enough for those of us on the other side of the country to urge a deep Left Coast yoga breath.

What may appear to be a sprint to fix (where is SNL's Keenan Thompson's Mr. Fix-It when the news industry so badly needs his exhortation?) the press is really much more a marathon. And many of us feel like we've been running it for a long time already.

Here we are, though, and it's a good time to take stock of the recent spike in save-the-press plans.

Overall, I'm struck with the similarity of the save-the-press gambits to the questions Barack Obama is facing. He's quite properly, and optimistically, told us to make lemonade from the fusillade of lemons being shot at us. He urges us to "fix it" and build for the future.

Similarly, we who care about journalism need to keep that same dual focus. Yes, the rapid flow of reporters out of the nation's newsrooms should be staunched, and yes, we should also recognize that the destruction we're seeing is a creative one and offers great promise for remaking journalism in our time. It's just that, at this point, there's so much more destruction than creation.

Just as similarly, the President has talked about the recovery package as a stool, with several legs, not a one-trick fix. That's just as true of the news fix - simply extracting new funds from readers isn't enough, though much of the recent flurry of missives have focused on that. The fix needs more legs.

As we collectively look to journalism's future, from the vantage point of a dark February 2009, I think we should have the following in our sights:

• Remember the old 80/20 rule: Yes, we love to talk about readers and how the Internet has broken the publisher/reader connection, but it's not really true. U.S. papers have long depended on ads for 80% of their revenue. Circulation revenues have paid for printing and distribution. Yes, it felt good to hear "my paper" from readers, but those reader dollars were not what funded the huge post-WW2 newsrooms. It was classifieds, department store ads and then, circulars.

So even reestablishing some kind of direct reader revenue - iTunes for news, micropayments, some Little Rock-on-steroids plan to charge for online news - will only help a bit, as Michael Kinsley has economically pointed out. It won't staunch the flow.

Brill's memo is well-constructed, but it misses the point of the web. As the New York Times itself found out with Times Select, the Times - no matter how good or seemingly unique - can only turn a handful of its 20 million unique visitors into paying customers.

• Go upstream to get more reader revenue: I'm one of those who believe that indeed, the Genie's long left the room and ain't coming back. Corralling enough now-free content behind some kind of pay wall is going to be nearly impossible in a wider world of "free" news. However, that doesn't mean that reader revenue is unobtainable.

I go back to the old world, to the old BBC model of taxing U.K. TV sets to fund the news enterprise. Why not institute a further tax on broadband service (where do the current taxes go anyway?) that would go into a pot to fund local journalism. Yes, deciding how to divvy it up would be torturous, but ACAP is a tagging method that could underlie such a system, and the Associated Press itself has figured out a lot about "universal tagging" through its emerging Digital Cooperative.

Pot disbursements must include journalism start-ups and not just newspaper companies. Just as readers have paid the cost of print distribution, they can pay it in the new world, too. Since newspaper companies (and others) have had insufficient leverage to compel carrier payment for content, taxation may be the best route. Or might this involve an updating of FCC/common carrier/public interest policies, rules that might better fit the realities of the 21st Century? (Some other thinking on Fed regulatory changes that may address the times, from John Chachas, can be found here.)

• Don't act like the greenhorns you are: Almost all of us writing about "saving the press" are immigrants, "digital immigrants" in the terminology of Marc Prensky. Digital natives, those under the age of 30 or so, do have different habits. Primary among those is that they take in news digitally as their first preference. Hey, maybe, unlike the rest of us, they figured out that it is really the newest news. So any plan to push them back to print - to yesterday's news - for the sake of saving reporters' jobs completely misunderstands the way the world has changed and how that change will only accelerate.

• Master the new business of advertising: Just as newspapers were stuck in reader browser mode for so long, as search and aggregation enveloped them, now they're stuck in a display ad world, as pay-for-performance (led by paid search) threatens to swamp less-measurable advertising. Sure, get as much money from readers - somehow - but remember that the ad business in the U.S. is worth close to $300 billion, annually. Newspapers used to get 20% of that pie, and news sites need to figure out how to get an equivalent percentage (at least) going forward.

• Think news, not newspapers: We should be clear on this distinction by now. Newsprint - pummeled by cost, resource concerns, implicit delay in delivering information and Kindle-like devices - is obsolescent. Yes, newspaper companies should milk the revenues the hybrid approach of print/online for as long as they can. Still, hybridization is rapidly happening even through the deep recession, and probably accelerated by it. Just as one data point, take a look at this Howie Kurtz piece on the changing face of D.C. coverage. It's a piece that shows all kinds of hybrid models in progress. The future won't look remotely like the past - though it can be built on the same values - and we must stop trying to re-create halcyon days that never were.

• And, lastly, don't tell me how much you value the press, but won't pay for it unless someone forces you to. The line I found most odd in Walter Isaacson's piece: "Even an old print junkie like me has quit subscribing to the New York Times, because if it doesn't see fit to charge for its content, I'd feel like a fool paying for it." How does he feel about NPR, surely one of the greatest public information bargains of all time? About one in six or seven NPR listeners, I believe, pony up. Do we wait for someone to compel us to pay?

The Times, as a profit-seeking institution, hasn't found a way to put out the tip jar yet, but that's still another means of funding we'll soon see as newspapers move from profitable to profit-seeking to unprofitable. They are all trying to grok how that rapid movement meshes - or doesn't - with the non-profit world. But as they, and we, figure it out, let's not let our old world notions of paying only when forced drive us forward.

Comments

[Oh-Boy:]

Young man, the problem with your newspaper business is that nobody wants to buy what you are selling. If the citizenry does not want your printed product, then it should die.

The concept of a subsidized print product has been tried before; the title of the periodical was "Soviet Life." How did that work out?

Feb 12 11:07 AM

[Richter Scale:]

Aside from the fact that youngsters don't want to read the "paper", the newspapers have done themselves a disservice by decimating the quality content that kept us "older folks" reading the paper: a lifelong habit. They also made a big mistake by putting their content online for free. Most of the news online seems to come from "papers".

Feb 13 01:53 PM

[Richter Scale:]

Aside from the fact that youngsters don't want to read the "paper", the newspapers have done themselves a disservice by decimating the quality content that kept us "older folks" reading the paper: a lifelong habit. They also made a big mistake by putting their content online for free. Most of the news online seems to come from "papers".

Feb 13 01:53 PM

[David in D:]

There is a fundamentally deeper issue here that hasn't been addressed but has been popping up in a variety of industries for a while. The "unravelling of authority" in postmodern society. Newspapers have lost "authority" as being "professional news" providers not because of anything they have done (at least primarily), but because the means of production have been demoncratized (digitally).

When there is not union to preserve what constitutes "news" and everyone has the ability to "publish" your industry is doomed. You seem similar pressure being put on higher education, but up until now, accreditation standards (the union) have managed to dictate what is legitimate and what is not.

Feb 14 02:08 PM

[Mad Hedge F...:]

Looks like the San Francisco Chronicle may be about to join the dustbin of history. The industry rag, Editor and Publisher, says that the privately owned Hearst Corporation has given the venerable paper an ultimatum to cut costs or close. The 150 year old Chronicle lost $50 million last year. Of course, this may all be a ploy just to beat up one of the last surviving unions, but they have made a similar threat to their paper in Seattle. Ironically, Hearst acquired the Chronicle and dumped the San Francisco Examiner in 2,000, which was then put on a crash diet and made profitable by its new owners. If the Chronicle goes it will join the Philadelphia Enquirer which went under last week, and the soon to be shut Christian Science Monitor. Google has been eating their lunch for years, and classified ads have migrated to Craig's List. It is tough to chop down a forest to make paper, get a union to print it, and manually distribute your product, and then compete against a one man email blast on costs. If the Chronicle goes it will be survived by a much smaller SFGate.com, one of the most successful web based newspaper portals out there. There could be a ninth earning save by a surprise buyer. But moguls willing to hemorrhage money just to promote a political view are a dying breed. Rupert Murdoch has been the only recent buyer of newspapers, and something tells me that a match with the Chronicle would not exactly be one made in Heaven. In five years there will probably be only two mass circulation papers left, The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, with the Washington Post as an outlyer. Thousands of small, local, niche publications will take up the slack. As a long time print journalist dating back to the typewriter days myself, I am sad to see newspapers go. But you can’t exactly sit like Denmark’s old King Canute and order the tide to stop rising. Journalism is degrading into an army of guys banging away at the computers at 3:00 AM in their boxer shorts. Trust, accuracy, objectivity, style, and taste will be the victims.

Feb 26 12:14 PM