Yesterday I sat down to ingest a pile of recent analyses of the imminent 'end of the newspaper' (see list at the bottom of this post). As I said in my Monday post, apart from my night job, I'm an ex-editor and occasional journalist; and I wanted to take a day or two to get my head round the fate of my old business. It's been clarifying for me - hope it's useful for you.
Here's the core points:
1) How particular the old, 20th century business model was. Paul Starr's calm and comprehensive piece in the New Republic makes it clear that when a commercial newspaper provided a 'public good' - for example, accurate and investigative reportage on the doings of those with power and money, or foreign reporting, or detailed arts coverage - it could do so because it had a strong claim on the majority of classified ads in its locality. Because of this, newspapers couldn't be dominanted by one or a small group of advertisers, which allowed them the freedom to fund the best journalistic principles - for muck-raking, "comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable". The coverprice was only ever one element in the financial mix that supported the journalistic enterprise. (Of course, newspapers could also be run by avaricious and ideologically-explicit moguls or corporation, salting away their high margins. But the papers' stranglehold on a certain kind of advertising revenue meant that the possbility of resourcing 'responsible journalism' was always there).
Nowadays the internet (as well as the rest of our exploding media-verse) is a much more powerful intermediary between advertisers and consumers than the old newspaper: the Web provides both more targeted marketing (Google), and extremely low-cost marketing (Craiglist). As the ad dollars leave the newspaper, its editorial latitude tightens.
As Clay's piece says, some newspapers had seen the writing on the wall for ages. Ten years ago I recall my own past papers in Scotland (the Herald) frantically setting up as many online classified ad-sites as they could, yet weirdly not plastering them with the paper's brand (eg, S1Jobs). Yet the digital tsunami is now sweeping away many of those who haven't managed to set up online intermediaries that could be as effective to their localities as Google, or E-Bay, or Craigslist. Add recession to this picture, and this explains the implosion of newspaper titles in the US and UK.
2) Company structure is still so important. Too many of these articles cite the Guardian Media Group as a possible model to follow - not just for their enthusiastic, long-term embrace of digital media, but also because of their status as a trust (the Scott Trust), which insulates them from shareholder-driven, quarterly-report-style performance pressures. Yet as we all know, the Guardian and Observer are loss-making operations, which get cross-subsidized from other GMG media properties like tv production, local radio and notably Auto-Trader, a long-standing 'intermediary' for buyers and sellers in the UK. (See this Guardian Media Group mogul's speech for how it all hangs together).
Certainly in the Scottish context which I know best, the large corporate owners who have recently taken over the major quality titles - Gannett and Thompson Press - are pushing for very high returns-on-investment, which has resulted in the usual reductions in staff, pagination and editorial reach of the product. (BTW, here's a suggestion for an online-savvy plan to rescue the quality Scottish titles). Yes, the internet has caused an irreversible upheaval in how people get and want their information. But it's difficult not to look at the persistent rapacity of commercial owners - who in the past, because of their advertising monopolies, enjoyed amazing profit margins of up to 30%, yet who hardly returned much of that as "R&D" for the future of journalism - as part of the cause of the current fragility of newspapers.
3) It's not clear how much people value news anymore. Paul Starr cites some interesting research into the impact of cable and satellite channels on news values. They seem to have caused a real polarisation - with some audiences rushing away from news altogether, into the arms of permanent entertainment; and some rushing towards the constant streams of dedicated news channels. As Starr puts it, we are increasingly dividing into "news-dropouts" and "news-junkies". What the professor laments in this scenario is the possible loss of the "general newspaper reader" - someone who buys their half-decent paper, reading (or at least noticing) some news about a world disaster or local corruption, as they make their way to the sports, lifestyle or jobs/property pages. With the death of the traditionally-balanced and inclusive paper, warns Starr, we get a potentially un-democratic gulf between the under-informed and the over-informed.
In response, Yochai Benkler (and supportively, Steven Johnson and Clay Shirky) point out that as old journalist institutions totter and fall, new ones are beginning to appear - ones that will be able to fulfill the "servicing of the public good" that rested on the largesse of the old ad-supported, locally-monopolistic city paper.
We should be conscious, says Benkler, that this is a shift from an industrial to a networked model of news production - from one where an enterprise dominates its market place making relatively stable revenues, to one which embraces "market and non-market, large scale and small, for profit and non-profit, organized and individual ways" of reporting news. A model which, by implication, brings in considerably less money overall. (Benkler is known for his big social theory which posits a third political economy of sharing, revealed by the internet, which we must now add to market and state economies)
Benkler has a list of "next-journalism" examples to watch for. Take what he calls "small-scale commercial media". These are net enteprises (currently mostly blogs) that have ascended the power-law curve of attention like Talking Points Memo, and use their slowly building online ad revenue to fund a small but intensely muck-raking and focussed journalistic staff. Is this journalism as it was - just as well-paid, with similar conditions and benefits? Probably not. But if you want to do what you'd regard (coming out of journalism school) as "proper journalism", this might be a new (if idealistic) haven.
Starr also calls out to philanthropists, asking them to put some of their civically-minded money into online investigative operations - Propublica being the obvious poster-child for this. I bet this gets some response on both sides of the pond. And it was fascinating to read recently that $5 billion of an endowment would ensure the perpetual running of the New York Times's newsroom, currently costing $200 milllion a year. (For newsrooms costing less, you could obviously scale it down). Isn't this an open-goal for our remaining tech-plutocrats? Will we see the new dot-com Hearsts fund their first serious paper in this way?
Another development Benkler urges us to note are the "new, volunteer-driven party presses" - like Daily Kos or Huffington Post on the American liberal left, and Town Hall and Drudge Report on the right. (The UK equivalents might be ConservativeHome, or Lenin's Tomb.) These sites will certainly dig up scandalous truffles on their ideological opponents - and cumulatively, that contrarian vigour will to some degree supplant what the political correspondants on newspapers used to do. Of course, this implies a net-era readership that is willing to actively sift through and assess all this flak, in order to get to the facts - rather than, as before, implicitly accepting the judiciousness of the political journalist.
The most fascinating signs of the future comes from what Benkler calls "newly effective nonprofits" - examples like the Sunlight Foundation, who use collaborative techniques to keep tabs on corruption and nest-feathering in American politics, using social-software tools to burrow through, and see patterns in, available public information. (The various projects coming out from MySociety in the UK are a parallel).
As Shirky has often asserted, this kind of 'many-eyes-solve-all-bugs' process might be, at least, a useful complement to the old Sunday Times 'Insight' ideal of investigative reporting - and perhaps, at best, a new model for collective vigilance over politicians and moguls. It makes me wonder whether there's a sweet spot here for newspaper operations that can hold their nerve in this crisis. Could they design their investigations in an open-source, Wikipedian way, inviting mass participation in the process, and as a result showing advertisers that there can be online enthusiasm for this kind of editorial? At the very least, it strikes me that journalists need to be talking to code jockeys and hackers a lot more, whether as part of their newspaper's internal strategy or not. Maybe the current spates of layoffs will result in some interesting mid-morning coffee conversations...
Starr's nostalgia for the newspaper as 'microcosm of the world' may persist with the bigger titles - the Guardian's, New York Times's and Die Zeit's that people will turn to for synoptic and highly-intelligent overviews of the world. And Starr articulates a real anxiety about the health of our democracies - with the demise of local journalists, who will hold local power to account? But it seems clear that what's coming to replace that is going to be a sprawling, messy but fertile new eco-system - involving a mix of underemployed journalists, new media and a wider citizen participation in the composition of what we regard as news. (Unless journalists go over to the 'dark side' of PR - where wages and conditions may match what's left behind, but at what ethical cost?)
4) There might be a solution in device-meets-retail. But there's probably not much time left on that one. Shirky makes a great point about the difference between an iTunes for news (Walter Issacson's pitch) and an iTunes for music - which is that when people buy an Arcade Fire track (or hey! a Hue And Cry track!), they want to listen to it over and over again. It's unlikely people would do that for a news article - it's much more "fungible" than music. (And which makes the argument for e-books, by comparison, pretty strong).
I reminisced on Monday about my own news-reading device fantasies of a decade ago - but I think the iPhone very easily demonstrates (particularly with the NYTimes app) how newspapers could build a single-pay, or even a subscription, revenue model for an iReader. (The subscription model comes a bit closer with yesterday's announcment that the iPhone 3.0 operating system, launching this summer, will allow for subscription to apps). But I think journalism is still awaiting the killer device - something which scales up the tactility, grace and readability of the iPhone interface. Compared to the collapse of mighty newspaper titles, my obession with the form factor of text-displaying devices might seem a bit marginal. But if you sample the reader responses to so many of the pieces I've digested for this blog (see list at the end of this post), you see regular rhapsodies from people about how much they love to physically sit with their paper, in a location and posture of their own choosing.
I don't think this physical, personal dimension of the news-reading experience should be underestimated. The rise of mobile computing (and wifi'd public or consumer spaces) is surely driven by a popular desire not be trapped in the cubicle posture - we want to be out and about in the streets, trailing our invisible digital communities with us, enjoying the gritty, fleshy propinquities of the town centre or city. Indeed, doesn't this strong wish that we take our devices with us into the heart of our urban experience really click with the sidewalk-spirit of the classic city/town paper?
Johnson and Shirky (Johnson for commercial reasons) are really hot on the possibility of geo-services as an answer to the demise of local journalism. Johnson hymns Brooklyn as "the world capital of blogging", where thousands of residents are using social tools and mobile camphones to re-enchant and "sousveille" their neighbourhood.
But in terms of realising this vision, isn't there a real design deficit here? Other than the avant-gardism of GPS-wielding students, or the wandering twitterings of those of us with smart-enough phones, have we really designed portable information devices that can give citizens a command of, and interface with, the flux and flow of their cities? For me, the answer is still 'No'.
As I said on Monday, if Apple isn't designing a scaled up iTouch/iPhone for the urban reader, and if it isn't trying to have conversations with major news outlets to have them design apps that bring a powerful custom experience to such devices, they'd be really missing a trick. (David Carr, writing in the NYT in January, makes his pitch as clearly as possible for this option). But waiting on the right device, and the right supportive network, is like wandering along the Burgess Shale, speculating on which adaptation will actually make it out of the mire... What will be, will be...
In any case, the transcendently articulate Shirky puts it all very clearly:
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
And I haven't even got to the question of how advertising itself can be ethically sustained, as a revenue for very much at all, in our coming post-consumerist eco-democracy...
A brief ludic note: what does all this have to do with a play ethic? Simply put: adult players need a world of high-quality knowledge to inform their enterprises and endeavours. I'm concerned here with the health of our cognitive environment, as it supports our potentiality. Again, it's about being play-ethical here, not just play-full.
Sources:
Paul Starr, Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers (Hello to a New Era of Corruption), New Republic
Yochai Benker, Correspondance on "A New Era of Corruption", New Republic
Steven Johnson, Old Growth Media and the Future of News, stevenberlinjohnson.com
Clay Shirky, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable, shirky.com
Jeff Jarvis, Can Journalism Go With The Flow?, Buzzmachine.com
Seth Godin, When Newspapers are Gone, What Will You Miss?
