A Paperless News World: Kinsley Nails It Again

A few weeks ago, Michael Kinsley brought blunt sanity to the dreamy talk about charging for news online in a New York Times op-ed. Today in his Washington Post column, he does likewise for dangerous dreams of subsidies. So papers are dying, he says:

What should we do? How about nothing? Capitalism is a “perennial gale of creative destruction” (Joseph Schumpeter). Industries come and go. A newspaper industry that was a ward of the state or of high-minded foundations would be sadly compromised. And for what?

If your concern is grander — that if we don’t save traditional newspapers we will lose information vital to democracy — you are saying that people should get this information whether or not they want it. That’s an unattractive argument: shoving information down people’s throats in the name of democracy.

But this really isn’t a problem. As many have pointed out, more people are spending more time reading news and analysis than ever before. They’re just doing it online. For centuries people valued the content of newspapers enough to pay what it cost to produce them (either directly or by patronizing advertisers). We’re in a transition, destination uncertain. Arianna Huffington may wake up some morning to find The Washington Post gone forever and the nakedness of her ripoff exposed to the world. Or she may be producing all her own news long before then. Who knows? But there is no reason to suppose that when the dust has settled, people will have lost their appetite for serious news when the only fundamental change is that producing and delivering that news has become cheaper.

Maybe the newspaper of the future will be more or less like the one of the past, only not on paper. More likely it will be something more casual in tone, more opinionated, more reader-participatory. Or it will be a list of favorite Web sites rather than any single entity. Who knows? Who knows what mix of advertising and reader fees will support it? And who knows which, if any, of today’s newspaper companies will survive the transition?

But will there be a Baghdad bureau? Will there be resources to expose a future Watergate? Will you be able to get your news straight and not in an ideological fog of blogs? Yes, why not — if there are customers for these things. There used to be enough customers in each of half a dozen American cities to support networks of bureaus around the world. Now the customers can come from around the world as well.

If General Motors (GM) goes under, there will still be cars. And if the New York Times (NYT) disappears, there will still be news.

Comments

[Vobogeck:]

Just out on Reuters: "Associated Press unveiled rate cuts on Monday to help member newspapers reeling from declining advertising revenue and said it would sue websites that use its members' articles without permission."

Jarvis assumes a static status quo, which is nonsense. The AP response is typical of what will happen, as the news providers stop giving their stories away free to Google etc. Although they may be slow to change, the newspapers will adapt and thrive. They will compensate for reduced advertising with a higher subscription, for those readers willing to pay for in-depth news. If they don't we will be left with the worthless drivel that passes for journalism on sites like Seeking Bears.

I am curious Jeff: how much does Seeking Bears pay you for posting on its web site? Do you get a cut of its advertising revenue? If not, how much longer will you continue to give away your time for free?

Apr 06 05:59 PM

[Mad Hedge F...:]

Jeff, please don't mind if I repeat my earlier comment because I think it's germain. The death of this industry should be covered. Please keep uo the coverage. I bumped into Jim Lehrer last night, the legendary anchor of “The News Hour With Jim Lehrer” on PBS, as he breezed through the San Francisco Bay Area promoting his 22nd novel, “Oh, Johnny”. The ex-Marine, who’s first big story was covering the Kennedy assassination in Dallas, had some cogent observations on the current demise of the US newspaper industry. Print media have traditionally been the originators of the news, the guys who went to the city council meeting and took copious, accurate, notes. For this, the paper got full page ads from the local car dealers and every other retail business. Now the car dealers are going under. The proliferation of new media, from radio to TV, the Internet, and smart phones means that the monetization of this content has moved downstream to be reaped by others. Talk radio, weekend news programs, comedy shows, even congressional debates, and yes, blogs (guilty), are feeding off of this news fount for free. The originating newspaper maybe gets a penny of each dollar of revenue spawned by their stories. Newspapers now have no choice but to cut costs by firing journalists and moving online. Thomas Jefferson said that “an informed electorate is essential for a democracy”. The big question is, when all the journalists are gone, where will the news come from? I have suspected all along that Truth, Accuracy, and Neutrality will be the big casualties of all of this. They will go the way of the full service gas station, free check in luggage on airlines, and home delivery of newspapers by teenage boys on bicycles.

Apr 06 06:17 PM

[Lightway:]

That is a good point about the use of bureaus. While blogging and other forms of reporting have increased our use of information and resources dramatically, there is still a need for the news shops, who have the resources and reputation, to go out and get access to data that most of us would not be able to get. I can't really embed myself with the 2nd Infantry Division from my blog, or get a one on one sitdown interview with the King of Jordan. Only the big guys can do these kinds of things.

A hybrid of big reporting, supplemented by a network of individual users is the way to go. CNN gets this, I just don't like their implementation, and their IReporting just comes across as cheesy and amateurish.

Apr 06 06:51 PM

[Tim H.:]

I agree Vobo... As Jarvis points out about Huffington Post. Go read Huffington. Majority of articles on Huffington are stolen from other news sources especially print media and then refabricated with Huffington's own headlines. Their is a short Huffington rift on article. Then a link to news source which is not Huffington. Huffington has it's own bloggers and reporters (Sam Stein). But mainly it's content is linked from print/online sources. It is in effect a left leaning news reader website. Which is fine. Similar but not as popular news websites abound on web. I don't agree about newspapers charging fees to read their news. But I do agree that newspapers will figure out how to charge websites like Huffington a fee for using their content which helps keeps the Huffington Post relevant. In other words what do newspapers GET out of news websites filfering their content to be used for their own content?


On Apr 06 05:59 PM Vobogeck wrote:

> Just out on Reuters: "Associated Press unveiled rate cuts on Monday
> to help member newspapers reeling from declining advertising revenue
> and said it would sue websites that use its members' articles without
> permission."
>
> Jarvis assumes a static status quo, which is nonsense. The AP response
> is typical of what will happen, as the news providers stop giving
> their stories away free to Google etc. Although they may be slow
> to change, the newspapers will adapt and thrive. They will compensate
> for reduced advertising with a higher subscription, for those readers
> willing to pay for in-depth news. If they don't we will be left with
> the worthless drivel that passes for journalism on sites like Seeking
> Bears.
>
> I am curious Jeff: how much does Seeking Bears pay you for posting
> on its web site? Do you get a cut of its advertising revenue? If
> not, how much longer will you continue to give away your time for
> free?

Apr 06 06:53 PM

[Doug Poretz:]

Here is the perspective of someone who has spent 40 years in the communications business (p.r., investor relations, interactive/digital, advertising, etc.). We are seeing the end of the Fourth Estate. tinyurl.com/ced8ku

This will be an especially dramatic loss at this time when the world is so volatile politically and the truth can be corrupted, rumors can be created, communities and be coalesced and moved into action via the Internet, globally, real time, 24/7/365. The agendas of online writers who do not necessarily need to subscribe to journalistic standards, who can even deceive their readers as to who they are, what credentials they may have, and what their goals are is just not equivalent to the professional journalist. I know papers like the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal have their own biases, but they also have a fundamental priority on accuracy and clarity. That's going to exist in the future but it will not set the tone of news as the newspapers/journalists do today. It will be a very costly loss when journalism ebbs more and neo-journalists assume their former role. It just isn't going to be the difference between reading something on a sheet of newsprint versus reading what's on a screen.

Apr 06 08:30 PM

[john1940:]

I weep for the future. I just don't see much chance of the future providing information content in the depth and quantity now available. I have used the New York Times reader and its information is extracted from the daily newspaper and reduced in total content. I also have difficulty reading a screen for a long period of time. I guess I'll be "left behind" or maybe just read the Economist.

Apr 06 10:39 PM

[Leftfield:]

First I want to say that at commentaries on other articles in SA about this subject there has been lots of thoughtful introspection by journalists about this sad state of their industry.

That said, the Hartford Courant has been a thorn in my side. When former Gov. Wieker got an income tax through, the Courant, which never met a tax or spending increase it didn't favor, didn't air the issue fairly. Earlier, Gov. Meskill had gotten an income tax though the opponent's argument that some other major tax needed ELIMINATION, not temporary reduction was aired. That tax was killed a week after passage. There were two major newspapers then.

Furthermore, a 40,000 protest at the capitol was described as 15,000. Middle-class taxpaying protesters were called an unruly mob.

There has long been too much opinion in news coverage almost always favoring more government for every problem. I think sites like SA that have reader input show some idea of how news coverage can evolve.

I don't miss the news industry as it exists. I saw TARP treated as a normal news story in the catatonic mainstream media and there has been little expose on the mess we're in today. I see it as an ogopoly that lost objectivity and purpose long ago.

Apr 06 10:54 PM

[William Cowie:]

Quote from the Washington Post op-ed:
"Will you be able to get your news straight and not in an ideological fog of blogs?"

That assumes (as journalists love to do) that newspapers peddle the "straight" truth. That might not be an accurate assumption.

Apr 06 11:00 PM

[Radio Writer:]

Mr. Jarvis, you only indented a single paragraph to indicate it was taken from Kinsley's op-ed article. In fact, everything from below the first paragraph was cut-and-pasted from his excellent piece. I'm assuming this was an oversight and you're not trying to imply authorship? I'd like to give you the benefit of the doubt, something I certainly wouldn't get in my own job writing for radio news. A mistake like that would get me fired, even if unintended. Please clarify. Thanks.

Apr 07 07:24 AM

[carey_jim:]

The real questions are,

1. How do we get the truth?

2. When we get the truth, how do we know it is the truth?

3. When we are lied to, how do we know we are being lied to?

The advertiser and propagandists will tell us that objective truth doesn't exist but only that which is advantageous for the rulers.

The religious will tell us the truth is simple dogma and must be received from priests, imams, rabbis and other authorities, and must be accepted without question.

The professors will offer us many systems of truth from which we must choose.

The scientists will tell us that truth is what can be verified by experience and reason.

Newspapers have evolved from very anarchic beginnings to relative stability and we have become accustomed to thinking that what they tell us is, 'the truth.'

That illusion is being shattered by the Internet.

What is the truth?

Apr 07 05:00 PM

[miche:]

"News" and "information" have been exchanged forever between human beings. There are trees in ancient cities where citizens would go crowd to hear the "newscallers" call out their news. Different newscallers would enjoy differing levels of popularity/celebrity/b... Now it's newspapers. Soon it will be different. "News" is necessary and valuable and it will continue to flow. We simply do not yet know how it will flow. It is troubling to watch an old system break down and a new one take its place because it's all in flux. Which methods prevail remain to be seen. Who figures out most quickly how to profit from it and fix a following will be not only the first "winner" but also the standard bearer from which we break to improve even further.

Apr 08 11:44 AM

[Darrell Tod...:]

I often agree with Jeff Jarvis, but I continue to be confused about this reliance on the "Baghdad Bureau" argument, as if there's something unique about military reporting that just can't be covered in a "new media" model.

I live and work outside Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, which is the home of the Army Engineer School, the Military Police School, and the Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear School. For us, Iraq news **IS** local news. When I worked at the Waynesville Daily Guide, we arranged for a National Guard lieutenant colonel to write a weekly column for us while he was deployed to Iraq that was so popular it got picked up by the Missouri National Guard and distributed statewide to National Guard families and interested newspapers. Now that I'm running an independent news site at the Pulaski County Daily News (pulaskicountydaily.com), I'm arranging for an active-duty colonel who is about to deploy there in a senior leadership staff position to do a weekly interview with me. Frankly, I hope in a year to have made arrangements for somebody from every significant unit out of Fort Leonard Wood to be doing at least a weekly column for us. In an ideal world I'd like to have a mix of several people ranging from junior enlisted to senior officers, but I realize that takes time for trust to develop,

Is this perfect? Absolutely not. "Citizen journalism" has its limits. But anyone familiar with the Army knows that since most soldiers are young, many soldiers blog and use MySpace and other social networking sites, and they don't stop doing that when deployed.

A lot of the content is already out there and just needs to be made more available through news websites. That requires news reporters who are familiar with the Army and have the trust of soldiers (granted, that may be in short supply considering the anti-military attitudes of too many reporters). And we can be **VERY** sure that the al-Jazeera staff will do as good or better of a job in providing the other side of the story. For whatever reason, the Islamic fundamentalists have become quite adept at using the internet for their purposes.

Frankly, I just don't see the problem. Citizen journalism can be applied rather well to military reporting, and a lot of it is already going on -- it just isn't being noticed by the media because too many reporters don't understand the Army and too many soldiers have given up on the media. It's not perfect, but I'd rather have five less-than-perfect bloggers writing about what their Army battalion is doing than one reporter trying to cover five brigades. And I think that is different only in name and not in basic news model from some of the hyperlocal internet experiments going on in the New York metro area.

Apr 17 07:20 PM