1 February 2009 >>
Here’s a TV report from 1981 predicting the future of newspapers. What’s interesting is how much of it misses the mark...and how much of it doesn’t.
Thousands of conservatives and even some moderates have complained during my more than three-year term that The Post is too liberal; many have stopped subscribing, including more than 900 in the past four weeks.
It pains me to see lost subscribers and revenue, especially when newspapers are shrinking. Conservative complaints can be wrong: The mainstream media were not to blame for John McCain’s loss; Barack Obama’s more effective campaign and the financial crisis were.
But some of the conservatives’ complaints about a liberal tilt are valid. Journalism naturally draws liberals; we like to change the world. I’ll bet that most Post journalists voted for Obama. I did. There are centrists at The Post as well. But the conservatives I know here feel so outnumbered that they don’t even want to be quoted by name in a memo.
Journalists bristle at the thought of their coverage being viewed as unfair or unbalanced; they believe that their decisions are journalistically reasonable and that their politics do not affect how they cover and display stories.
Tom Rosenstiel, a former political reporter who directs the Project for Excellence in Journalism, said, “The perception of liberal bias is a problem by itself for the news media. It’s not okay to dismiss it. Conservatives who think the press is deliberately trying to help Democrats are wrong. But conservatives are right that journalism has too many liberals and not enough conservatives. It’s inconceivable that that is irrelevant.”
[...]
The opinion pages have strong conservative voices; the editorial board includes centrists and conservatives; and there were editorials critical of Obama. Yet opinion was still weighted toward Obama. It’s not hard to see why conservatives feel disrespected.
Are there ways to tackle this? More conservatives in newsrooms and rigorous editing would be two. The first is not easy: Editors hire not on the basis of beliefs but on talent in reporting, photography and editing, and hiring is at a standstill because of the economy. But newspapers have hired more minorities and women, so it can be done.
Rosenstiel said, “There should be more intellectual diversity among journalists. More conservatives in newsrooms will bring about better journalism. We need to be more vigilant and conscious in looking for bias. Our aims are pure, but our execution sometimes is not. Staff members should feel in their bones that unfairness will never be tolerated.”
Bob Steele, ethics scholar at the Poynter Institute, which trains journalists, thinks editors should be doing “ongoing content evaluation of candidates and issues to provide scrutiny on photos, stories, placement of stories and what are the weaknesses and strengths of the candidates.” He also recommends “prosecutorial editing” as one way to “minimize the ideological bias and beliefs that all journalists have. It would greatly reduce the news content being skewed by beliefs.”
The Post and other news media can work harder on eliminating even the perception of bias while never giving up the willingness to follow stories that will inevitably tick off some readers.
Intellectual diversity in the newsroom is essential to the quality of the media’s product. There need to be people involved in the reporting process who challenge the assumptions of the dominant thinking in the industry.
Today, it’s clear that isn’t the case, and that’s one of the reasons for the sorry financial state of the news business.
[I]t’s kind of depressing if mobility and the human excretory process are the best arguments to be made for why the print medium won’t go way of the dodo, don’t you think?
—Paul La Monica, in response to comment from venture capitalist Roger McNamee.
17 July 2007 @ 8:46AM >>BusinessWeek asks, “Which major American newspaper should be the first to throw up its hands and stop publishing a print product?”
This could be the worst year for newspapers since the Great Depression. The double-digit revenue declines long forecast by doomsters have arrived. While nearly all the major papers still post profits, albeit smaller than before, a few prominent ones are losing boatloads. At Hearst Newspapers’ San Francisco Chronicle, according to a deposition given by James M. Asher, the company’s chief legal and business development officer, losses of $330 million piled up between mid-2000 and September, 2006, better—or should I say worse?—than $1 million a week. During negotiations with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s unions, the owning Block family disclosed that the paper lost $20 million in 2006. Late last year, The Boston Globe was headed for unprofitability as well, according to The Wall Street Journal.
And 2007 does not look materially kinder than 2006 for any of these papers. One senior executive describes the climate like this: “If you told me 24 months ago that revenues would be declining as much as they are today, I’d say you were smoking dope.”
So, which paper should be the first to abandon print? Read the piece for the author’s opinion, which differs from mine.
I keep reading about how hybrid cars and compact fluorescent lightbulbs can reduce the production of greenhouse gases, but I have yet to see an article about the savings that could be achieved if we were to stop delivery of newspapers and magazines and do all of our news reading on line.
17 December 2006 @ 9:49AM >>
According to a government report, daily use of the Internet has become more common among Americans than newspaper reading.
13 December 2006 >>
Some thoughts on the future of newspapers from The Atlantic Monthly:
[T]op reporters and columnists at major newspapers are realizing (or will realize soon) that their fates are not necessarily tied to those of their employers. As portals and search engines and blogs increasingly allow readers to consume media without context or much branding, writers like Thomas Friedman will increasingly wonder what is the benefit of working for a newspaper—especially when the newspaper is burying his article behind a subscriber wall. It will require only a slight shift in the economic model for the Friedmans of the world to realize that they don’t need the newspapers they work for; that they can go off and blog on their own, or form United Artists-like cooperatives to financially support their independent efforts.
So what should newspapers do? They could stop printing. It may happen eventually, or perhaps newsprint will find a financially sustainable market among the elite and elderly (or perhaps it will have a nostalgic vogue not unlike that of, say, heirloom tomatoes), but that’s not what I’m getting at. The current Web-publishing model that newspapers are using isn’t likely to become financially viable anytime soon. With few exceptions, the media businesses thriving on the Web either are low-cost blog-like efforts or follow a many-to-many model, in which communities create, share, and consume content. Publishing an article on the Web gets you one click; getting your users to write the article for you gets you a thousand clicks, and costs less to boot. In other words, turning your users into contributors increases their engagement with your site—each click is, after all, also an “ad impression”—while simultaneously generating more content that you in turn can sell to advertisers.
That, I’d venture, is how you start rethinking the newspaper business. Not only do you allow your reporters to blog; you make them the hubs of their own social networks, the maestros of their own wikis, the masters of their own many-to-many realms. To take but one example, Kelefa Sanneh is the pop-music critic for The New York Times. He is very likely the best music critic in the country, and certainly the best new Times music writer in years. Let’s say that Sanneh creates his own community around the music he likes. Or The Washington Post’s Dana Priest creates an interactive online universe around her intelligence reportage. With editorial oversight only for libel and factual accuracy, Sanneh or Priest are allowed to do whatever they want on their sites (while their mother ships pour their resources into marketing them). In Sanneh’s case, allow other people to write music reviews under the Times/Sanneh “brand.” In Priest’s case, turn the site into a clearinghouse for global intelligence information, rumors, conspiracy theories, and so forth (obligatory disclaimer: “The views of posters do not necessarily represent those of the Washington Post Company”). Go even further: incentivize the critics and reporters by allowing them to profit based on the popularity of their sites; make it worth their while to stick around.
[...]
Playing this logic out, the next task would be uniting the Sanneh or Priest site to the Times or Post whole. You could essentially self-syndicate, sending your regular Times or Post headlines to Sanneh’s and Priest’s sites, luring readers back to the mother ship while increasing the number of times each story is read. Indeed, the logic could be (and in some circles already is being) played out even further. What if you essentially exploded the central function of the newspaper and “microchunked” (to borrow a current term) the content, syndicating all of it to bloggers or other news sites in return for a share of any advertising revenue each site generates? The Associated Press has made this the centerpiece of its digital-age strategy: it recently signed a potentially breakthrough deal with Google, in which Google will pay the AP for access to its stories; and the AP has launched a broadband player that Web sites can use to access AP video content. Its content goes where the readers are, and the AP gets paid, no matter what. Remarkably, this most old-school of services is a lone bright spot in the MSM landscape. The AP’s revenues have increased from more than $593 million in 2003 to more than $654 million in 2005; its digital revenue grew at a rate of 66 percent from 2004 to 2006. Of course, the AP has always been a syndicator, so no conceptual leap of faith (indeed no leap whatsoever) was required to move the business from analog to digital.
For the past several years, newspapers have been reporting on their own circulation declines with a strange degree of intensity. They write prominent, mournful, self-flagellating stories of their own decline that remind me of a friend who used to sniff his own underarm when he knew it was particularly randy. Every six months, when the circulation figures are reported, a new round of articles appears.
The media executive Allan D. Mutter makes a very interesting point on his blog about circulation declines: a lot of them are essentially intentional. That is, circulation figures are falling in part because many newspapers�in response, I am guessing, to recent audit scandals at Newsday and elsewhere�have stopped distributing free or cheap copies of their papers, which used to be helpful in padding circulation figures.
This may be true, although I don’t see how this can be spun into a sign of health for newspapers. I also find it hard to believe that newspapers aren’t losing any readers due to competition from online (and other) outlets.
But let’s be generous and assume that 75% of circulation declines are a result of gradually eliminating deceptive circulation-pumping practices. What this means is that newspaper circulation is still declining several percentage points a year (depending on the particular paper) and that newspapers are obliquely owning up to the fact that they’ve been releasing artificially inflated circulation numbers for years.
This theory suggests that long-term declines in newspaper circulation won’t be as severe as current numbers indicate, but in order for this theory to be true, newspapers have to admit to yet another ploy that undercuts their credibility. Not exactly a face-saving trade-off.
15 December 2005 >>
For far too long, newspaper websites have required that users register in order to read articles. Not only is it annoying for the user, it increases the chance that your inbox will become laden with spam. It also largely removes the newspaper from the global online discussion; bloggers are far less likely to point readers to a site that requires them to jump through hoops just to read an editorial or news item. On the web, if you can’t link to it, it might as well not even exist.
So I’m happy to report a welcome trend: somenewspapers are seeing the light and doing away with the digital gates. Let’s hope that continues. In the meantime, for people who wish to keep their e-mail addresses private, there are other ways of crashing the gates.
9 December 2005 >>
I remember seeing an old New Yorker cartoon years ago that had a guy in a bookstore telling a clerk, “I’d like a book on chutzpah, and I want you to pay for it.”
Out of that same mold comes this proposal from Joe Mathewson, a journalism professor at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism:
[N]ewspapers, as important to the civic health of our society as public transportation, have a claim on public allegiance that goes beyond financial measure. Does anyone believe that our society is better, our civic virtue enhanced, by the failure of the Washington Star and the New York Herald Tribune and the Chicago Daily News and all the other fine dailies that have perished for purely financial reasons?
Because declining readership and revenue threaten the newspaper industry, Professor Mathewson recommends converting newspapers into tax-exempt entities. In effect, taxpayers would be underwriting the publishing of newspapers by giving them a free pass on their tax bills.
Just imagine...not only would you have the privilege of choosing to buy the print edition of The New York Times or paying $50 a year for TimesSelect, under Mathewson’s scheme, you’d have the additional privilege of subsidizing the Times through tax breaks, which would underwrite an editorial page that consistently calls for higher taxes. You’d be paying taxes so the Times could lobby for you to pay even more taxes.
Hollywood is about to deliver bad news to the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times and, to a lesser extent, other big-city dailies around the country. Every major movie studio is rethinking its reliably humongous display ad buys in those papers because those newsosaur readers are, to quote one mogul, “older and elitist” compared to younger, low-brow filmgoers — so it makes no sense to waste the dough.
Wait, it gets worse: I’ve learned that at least two Hollywood movie studios have decided to drastically cut their newspaper display ads as soon as possible.
[...]
“We’re rethinking our newspaper ads and I mean, literally, on every movie. Everybody is,” one movie mogul tells me. “The only people who read newspapers are older and elitist. Movies like Sky High don’t need ads in The New York Times. But the studios did it because newspapers were seen as a necessary evil.
2 August 2005 @ 1:43PM >>
Judge Richard Posner has a lengthy, thought-provoking article in The New York Times on the changes brought on by an ever-increasing choice in media consumption.
Among the topics Posner addresses is the adversarial-yet-symbiotic relationship between online citizen-journalists and their professional counterparts in the establishment press:
What really sticks in the craw of conventional journalists is that although individual blogs have no warrant of accuracy, the blogosphere as a whole has a better error-correction machinery than the conventional media do. The rapidity with which vast masses of information are pooled and sifted leaves the conventional media in the dust. Not only are there millions of blogs, and thousands of bloggers who specialize, but, what is more, readers post comments that augment the blogs, and the information in those comments, as in the blogs themselves, zips around blogland at the speed of electronic transmission.
This means that corrections in blogs are also disseminated virtually instantaneously, whereas when a member of the mainstream media catches a mistake, it may take weeks to communicate a retraction to the public. This is true not only of newspaper retractions - usually printed inconspicuously and in any event rarely read, because readers have forgotten the article being corrected - but also of network television news. It took CBS so long to acknowledge Dan Rather’s mistake because there are so many people involved in the production and supervision of a program like ‘’60 Minutes II'’ who have to be consulted.
The charge by mainstream journalists that blogging lacks checks and balances is obtuse. The blogosphere has more checks and balances than the conventional media; only they are different. The model is Friedrich Hayek’s classic analysis of how the economic market pools enormous quantities of information efficiently despite its decentralized character, its lack of a master coordinator or regulator, and the very limited knowledge possessed by each of its participants.
In effect, the blogosphere is a collective enterprise - not 12 million separate enterprises, but one enterprise with 12 million reporters, feature writers and editorialists, yet with almost no costs. It’s as if The Associated Press or Reuters had millions of reporters, many of them experts, all working with no salary for free newspapers that carried no advertising.
How can the conventional news media hope to compete? Especially when the competition is not entirely fair. The bloggers are parasitical on the conventional media. They copy the news and opinion generated by the conventional media, often at considerable expense, without picking up any of the tab. The degree of parasitism is striking in the case of those blogs that provide their readers with links to newspaper articles. The links enable the audience to read the articles without buying the newspaper. The legitimate gripe of the conventional media is not that bloggers undermine the overall accuracy of news reporting, but that they are free riders who may in the long run undermine the ability of the conventional media to finance the very reporting on which bloggers depend.
This is an interesting point, but I think Posner is conflating two separate issues. Bloggers are undoubtedly dependent on the establishment press. A significant portion of what bloggers comment on happens to be the end-product of the news industry, and that end-product would not exist without the news-gathering apparatus of the establishment press.
However, bloggers are not any more “free riders” than people who write letters to the editor. The only difference is, if I write a letter to the editor of The New York Times, the odds are very small that it would be run, and if it is, I’d be lucky to get more than a hundred words printed. But with a website such as this, I effectively bypass the gatekeeper who decides what to print, and I can find an audience for my thoughts.
Posner’s real issue isn’t with bloggers, but with the current business model of the print media. It wasn’t hordes of drooling bloggers that forced The New York Times to publish their articles online for free; they—as did most of the establishment media—decided to do so voluntarily, long before there were such things as blogs. Inherent in putting up a web page is the ability for other people to link to it. That’s what blogs do; they link to other sources, many of which run ads on their pages.
So if I send a reader from this site to The New York Times, I am not diminishing the financial position of the Times unless they’ve structured their business in such a way to take a loss from web-based readers. But considering the prevalence of ads on the Times website, they are likely benefitting—not hurting—by my sending readers their way. Either way, it is not incumbent upon bloggers to devise a working business model for the establishment press. We bloggers haven’t even found a reliable business model in which we can make money, and I don’t see anyone in the old media shedding tears over that.
In the long-run, I think blogs help the establishment press by (1) forcing them to have a better product, and (2) putting more people in contact with that product. Whether people like or dislike what’s produced by the media is not determined by blogs. But blogs are great at shoving potential customers through the doors of sites like The New York Times, CNN.com, etc. If those potential customers feel like they’re being played for fools once they’re inside the gates of Big Media, that’s out of our control.
11 March 2005 @ 9:13AM >>
More evidence of the establishment media’s continued decline:
The Prudential Equity Group issued a biting 72-page report this morning on the state of circulation and found that both quality and quantity continue to decline.
[...]
“Decline in both quality and quantity of circulation at several key newspapers owned by the New York Times Co. and Tribune, points to the potential for further pricing pressure from advertisers in future quarters,” the report observed.
[...]
Prudential said it compiled the report at this time because of the industry’s “very difficult year” in circulation and because circulation “is a key metric in setting advertising rates.”
Glenn Reynolds cites the report above, and notices something odd:
I cancelled my newspaper subscription — not out of pique, as is probably the case with many LAT subscribers, but because we weren’t reading it any more, and copies just piled up. They sent a guy to my house to offer me a free subscription. I said no, but last week they just started delivering copies again anyway. I thought it was just a mistake by our carrier, but now I wonder if it wasn’t a circulation-boosting strategy . . . .
22 December 2004 @ 2:57PM >>
Industry publication Editor & Publishercites a Gallup poll showing the Internet to be the only news delivery medium that’s grown in use over the past two years:
[E]very source has fallen somewhat since 2002, with only news on the Internet gaining, from 15% going there every day two years ago to 20% doing so today.
Some sources dropped heavily: National newspapers are off 4%, from 11% to 7%; NPR is off 5%; local TV news is down 6%; network news down 7%; and PBS news plunged 8%. In that company, local newspapers are doing fairly well, only dropping 3%. Cable news dropped 2%.
Some may attribute this to the public’s rejection of the perceived bias of the traditional media. Others will say that it is a predictable effect of the continued penetration of the Internet. One thing’s for sure: people have only so much time in the day, so as one medium boosts its audience, it will naturally come at the expense of other media. The question is, will the traditional media grudgingly accept this New (Media) World Order, or will they fight for their audience by revamping their product?
