Who’s destroying journalism? Oh snap, my bad.
I recently did something that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. I canceled my print newspaper subscription to the News and Observer . (Well, actually, I backtracked to a Friday-through-Sunday subscription after my wife pitched a fit over the cancellation.)
For the first time in nearly a half century, I do not wake up every day to find a newspaper at the end of my driveway. When I was a kid growing up in Buffalo, New York, we got two daily newspapers – the Courier Express and the Buffalo Evening News. It’s hard to imagine that level of competition existing today.
Why cancel? Well, money was part of it -- an annual subscription now costs nearly $200 and that particular month all three of my kids seemed to need shoes. And food. And the two big ones were petitioning for yet another cell phone bailout.
There was also the huge pile of paper that seemed to pursue me relentlessly: in my car, in my living room, on my workbench. Read me. Read me. Read me. I generally scanned each issue, but except for Sunday, never really READ them. (Skim-reading is an occupational hazard for PR people.) I felt like I was falling behind, never, ever, to catch up.
Secondly, hard-copy publications are hardly “news you can use,” Research, client communications, comment and analysis – all this now happens online. That darn hard copy was always somewhere else when I needed it.
Thirdly, my family stopped using the newspaper as an advertising medium years ago. An ad for a neighborhood garage sale costs $26, about half the take for some of our less successful events. Need to sell something? Craig’s list is better, faster and free. Full-color pictures, unlimited words, and crazy people don’t get your phone number.
Finally, there was the green issue. I was accumulating hundreds of pounds of paper every year. Sure, I tried to recycle it, but found out that our town discards newspaper if it gets wet on rainy collection days. So a good part of our hoard went in the landfill anyway.
So I cut back my newspaper purchases. And then the News and Observer layoffs started. Coincidence? Maybe. But if an English/History major in the PR business isn’t subscribing, what does that mean for the future of newspapers?
Based on what’s happening at the N&O, it means no more true “beat” reporters. Such specialization is a luxury in the short-staffed bullpen of the future. We can expect even less reporting on dry (but important) subjects like state and local government, taxation or insurance, and probably not a whole lot of primary research or investigative journalism. Too time-consuming, too labor intensive, too expensive.
Perhaps most concerning, we can expect journalistic points of view to skinny down to, well, one. The Charlotte Observer and the News and Observer are really one publication from a business standpoint. So the viewpoint of Bill Kruger – now editor in charge of the newspapers’ joint state capital staff -- will likely establish the political point-of-view at both publications. One guy decides what news hundreds of thousands of readers will get? Makes me long for the days of two daily newspapers.
Oh, I forgot. I killed them.
Comments
Paul, I know you probably remember that there was a time when our own N&O and San Jose's Mercury News had two of the best online newspapers in the country, leaping out ahead of the big-city "national" papers. What happened?
I just don't believe that there is a shortage of demand for thoughtful, quality jounalism, and I don't believe there are no revenue models that can create thriving local newspapers that support that kind of journalism. I look at the success of local newspapers like the Lawrence Journal-World in Kansas, and I wonder why other newspapers are having such a hard time adapting.
I get the same kind of feeling about local newspapers as I do about the recording industry, and (to some extent) the movie industry: that they're too busy fighting perceived new threats to recognize - much less, seize - new opportunities.
When I worked in the marketing department of The Indianapolis Star a few years ago, I sat in many meetings where we racked our brains trying to think of ways to fight those perceived new threats The Other Paul mentioned. And we knew all about the paper issue; the green-minded younger folks we so eagerly sought as readers cited it time and time again as a reason for not subscribing. (Why, I wondered then as now, don't the newspapers themselves set up recycling programs?)
It was frustrating because I believed, and still do, that the Information Age had the potential to see a boom in news consumption -- nowadays we care more than ever about what's going on in the world, and that stodgy old building downtown still houses the largest squad of news-gatherers in the state. Surely a hundred folks with phones and cars and connections and digital cameras with satellite uplinks could be the trusted, valued eyes and ears of a populace ever more interested in knowing what's going on. But no.
Our meetings focused more on selling different-shaped ads on the cover of the paper, charging folks to search through our archives and trying to convince the local car dealerships that folks under 60 really do still read the paper, because the latest study we paid to have done swears it's true. We ran double-truck full page ads touting our own "Reach" and I have no doubt that they all ended up unread, soggy in a landfill.
Oh, and the reporting got safer and safer as all the reporters did their best to type while looking over their shoulders for somebody approaching with a pink slip.
When I left I did it with regret, but trusting that the many, many smart, dedicated and passionate people still left in that big brick building would find a way to make it work. I check in from time to time, of course -- at indystar.com.
Thanks for sharing Paul. The other day I saw information from Facebook used as a source in a story...and I knew investigative journalism was truly dead. However, I have heard that small community newspapers are faring better than the larger dailies. Does anyone agree?
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