Diary of a Mad Voter: Heath Haussamen
Will newspaper failures cripple watchdog journalism?
Newspapers must move to a new business model that shifts the focus to the Internet. And they must do it now.By Heath Haussamen, 12-10-08
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The news from the newspaper industry in the last week has been disturbing. The New York Times is borrowing some $225 million against its headquarters building to free up cash. Tribune Co., which publishes the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The Miami Herald, and the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, have joined the list of newspapers that are for sale.
The Rocky Mountain News is owned by E.W. Scripps Co., which closed down the Albuquerque Tribune earlier this year after it failed to find a buyer, and there seems to be a good chance the Denver paper is headed for the same fate.
When I was studying journalism in college 10 years ago, professors predicted that the shift to the Internet was 50 years away. But the ease of accessing information on the Internet and advances in technology, coupled with the failure of newspapers to adapt and the current economic woes, means the climax of that shift is upon us.
Newspapers are currently in as bad a spot as the ailing American automotive industry that is about to get a big, taxpayer-funded bailout. I believe many newspapers are going to shut their doors for good during this economic downturn, crippling watchdog journalism in some communities. The biggest threat is in smaller towns, where big-city corporations have that have snatched up little papers for years to try to boost profits are likely to, in some cases, give up on those endeavors.
Such towns usually have one daily newspaper and draw less attention from television and Internet journalists than larger cities. Towns of thousands or tens of thousands of people could literally be left without a reliable journalistic source of information about their local government and other news when their daily newspaper stops publishing. At best, they might be left with an alternative weekly.
Clearly, the newspaper industry needs a new business model.
Leaping off a proverbial cliff
I recently had a long conversation with a newspaper editor about the future of the industry. He was generally at a loss for solutions, as are most newspaper executives. I don’t have great ideas either. But I know that it’s possible to make money online. As an independent, online journalist, I’ve been making a living that way for almost three years through a combination of advertising sales on my news Web site, financial contributions from readers of my site and contract work for other media organizations.
Though I was effectively leaping off a proverbial cliff when I left behind a stable paycheck, employer-paid health insurance and employer contributions to my 401(k) in May 2006 to start my own business, it’s worked thus far. And, despite the economic downturn, my little business appears poised to survive.
Meanwhile, I know newspaper journalists who have had to change jobs because of the Albuquerque Tribune’s closing, many of them leaving the business altogether for other work. I know other journalists who are simply out of work.
I almost hate to say this out loud, because I don’t like and even fear what is happening to newspapers, but the reality is that, to survive, many are going to have to scale back staffs even further than they already have and -- even more difficult to fathom -- stop publishing daily print editions.
That will be unfair to many people, primarily from older generations, who may not have the access or skills to use the Internet, but in some communities, newspapers won’t have another choice. Some will have to publish primarily online, choosing to continue publishing perhaps a weekly print edition on Sunday or another day.
The future is upon us
It’s going to happen in the next few years. In fact, it’s already happened in Madison, Wis., but there’s another paper still publishing daily print editions in that city. Pretty soon, it will happen in a city where there is only one daily.
The shift will probably continue at first in smaller and mid-sized cities like Madison, where such a bold move would get widespread trade-publication exposure but not necessarily make the front page of the New York Times if it fails.
This has already been an ugly transition to the Internet, and that will continue. There will be fewer journalists working for newspapers. In the interim, more non-profit, online-only news organizations will spring up, like the New Mexico Independent (for which I write), but many journalists won’t be able to find such work and will have to change careers.
Which is a big part of the explanation for why this hasn’t happened more quickly. What editor wants to cut his staff in half? But I fear that the newspaper industry’s failure to move more quickly toward an Internet publication model (which involves a lot more than creating the nice Web sites many newspapers have) is a big part of the reason many more newspapers will shut their doors in the coming months and years as the nation struggles through what will be, at best, an incredibly deep recession.
I’m not sure what journalism in America will look like on the other side of the economic downturn -- and I fear what the change could mean for democracy when there are fewer and fewer watchdogs -- but the change appears to be inevitable, like it or not. And it’s here -- now.
My hope is that the free flow of information and news will continue, as it always has.
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Comments
Those living outside of the metropolitan areas who haven't succumbed to a know-it-all publishing and government elite are looking for the truth and they are finding it in alternative locations. People still capable of critical thinking are looking at what they see and are rejecting the mainstream for what it is - self-serving big government is better, I know more than you know so let me control your life - viewpoints.
The death of newspapers doesn't surprise me in the least. I used to subscribe to our local daily and just kept getting frustrated reading it when most of the stories that were published were contrary to other sources of information that I was hearing and reading. In reading a paper, if its viewpoints are objective and well researched, you should agree with at least half the articles. If not, they obviously are not printing news but rather opinions. Also, when reading the opinions and letters to the editor if I disagree with most of them, that tells me the subscriber base isn't reflecting my views.
I cast my vote by cancelling my subscription. As readership goes down, advertisers are no longer reaching the market they wish to reach and so advertising revenue, which the lifeblood of the paper drops and so the cycle deepens.
If newspapers wish to survive they better look at going back to reporting news fairly, accurately and responsibly otherwise more papers will disappear.
Short answer: Yes.
But I've seen some awfully talented Paraplegics over the years who are so good at what they do you don't notice their disability. And they even have their own Olympics.
The silver lining about the Dinosaur newspapers dying off after being hit by the Internet asteroid is two fold: it should serve to kick the corporate owners of congomerate news media in the head to rmind them that they do NOT own the news and should not run it as a For Profit business to reward investos or anyone else. News needs to be a nonprofit public service. NPR and BBC have illuminated the path . We just need to multiply that out by , oh say , a factor of 20 fold. Everywhere. The Big Chain newspapers are dying by their own hand---and the dagger in that hand is the mandate from the Boardroom that they produce at least a 20 percent return on expenses. Twenty percent...that's a lotta barrels of ink...and that mandate pervades the newsprint industry top down.
My own local newspaper in Cody Wy is a perfect case in point at the small end. The Editor-Pubisher is also 30 percent limited partner ower in a small family owned coglomerate of maybe seven papers in Montana and Wyoming. He runs the paper to make money , not provide news. Lots of money ...as much as he can possibly extract or extort from the local market. ( And he has a new $ 1 million plant to pay off ) That is exactly backwards of all journalism pretext I was taught in college--- (Disclosure: I began working at selfsame newspaper as a junior in high school and came back fulltime as a young adult and have been a photojournalist all my life, 41 years now ). In the ideal newsworld ecology , you run your business like a newspaper. You do NOT run your newspaper like a business. But that has been lost, everywhere.
Take the big Lee Newspapers chain that owns several papers in Montana , including the ( New York Times of West Dakota, the Billings Gazette )and the statewide flagstone Casper Star Tribune in Wyoming. Lee Enterprises , based in Davenport Iowa ---the home of chiropractry which should not be lost on folks in LeeWorld ---- has seen its stock plummet form over $ 36 per share to less than a single dollar at one point last week. It may go to pennies. Lee is freaking out , internally. And my morning Billings Gazette has the highest ad rates I have eve seen in a small metro daily , adn the papr has become totally saturated with advertising , to the point you have to do triage to find any actual news in its bloated corpus. Lee did something beyonf belief a few years ago. They bought Pulitzer papers. OMG...spent over a billion bucks if I recall in a giant spasm of Empire Building . What an incredibly bold, stupid move. It is the debt service on paying off Pulitzer that is sinking Lee's boat. They might as well have steered straight into the iceberg, backed up, and rammed it again and again ...becasue this boat is unsinkable, right ? Oops...
Lee has gone beyond cutting the newsroom and reportorial staff to the bone. They are amputating limbs. That did not do anything to staunch the loss of circulation. But boy am I ever getting sick of all the advertising. Tsunamis of print ads are what's killing the newspapers as much as anything. Acute obesity. But-- When the newspapers do fall, the advertising based model dies with them. And frankly , people, that is a very good thing. Advertising per se has only really existed in the print media ecology since approximately 1840. If it were done in moderation , advertising would be a good thing and complementary to the greater corpus of the actual reporting. But most folks do not realize that the reason your newspaper contains so much advertising is the US Postal Service requires that the paper be at least 50 percent advertising to qualify for the Second Class postage rate, which allows papers to travel on first class mail pallets but pay the same as bulk mail rates. Imagine a newspaper if you can that only has 25 percent advertising space and made ends meet. Recent Billings Gazette have been close to 90 percent advertising if you count the stuffers and broadsheet flyers within. The actual paper itself is still above 65 percent ads on some days. That's just plain wrongheaded.
Second, as the Dinosaurs fall and big daily newspapers fold, the small furry animals on the forest floor will evolve and take over the world. There will always be demand for News, and the ecology is there to support the warm blooded hunter-gatherers . Nature abhors a vaccuum. The news niche will be filled.
( Then there is the curious case of the Christian Science Monitor no longer publishing on paper at all ? Wow. here come a whole new branch of the tree. That story will await another day.)
The forefront question becomes: Can Bloggers do first rate , in depth investigative reporting ? If so, can they do it without the mass and prestige of a very large news media orgnaization behind them to counterbalance the excesses or obstructions thrown down by the newsmakers ? Or let me put that another way ---will the scurulous and the corrupt get a free pass for their bad behavior because there weren't any watchdogs to bark ? Conversely , will the angelic and the humanitarian go unrewarded or unheralded because the news industry couldn't dispatch a reporter and photographer ?
What a paradox it is to visit Hearst Castle in San Simeon , California. There you will find that William Randolph Hearst was making more money peddling news , making news, controling news, and all that traveled with it in his time than Bill Gates and Warren Buffet ever dreamed of in ours. Rupert Murdoch wouldn't fill WR's back pocket. There must be a lesson in there somewhere.
The Third Age of journalism is upon us. The Hearst Era is ancient history overlapping the other robber barons of those times . The forces currently deforming and devolving the News industry today are market driven ( digital) , but wholly beyond the news conglomerates (analog, steampunk, antediluvian) to control. They hate that. It is not in their DNA to overcome , I fear. Damned asteroid...it hit just when things were going great for the Rupert Murdochs and Lees of the world. Fast forward and you see that Google is not Hearst. But Arianna Huffington and Kos and show promising genetics.
The only thing that c an save newspapers as we used to call them and maintain large newsrooms with enough depth and budget to go land the Great White Whales of actualities , and lesser fish, globally is the emergence of electronic paper and ink. Whomever invents the pocket scroll that you unroll and pages magically appear in full color pixels with layers of information, fully touch screen and WiFi-WiMax-5th Gen wireless celltech---that is the warm furry mammal who will rule the world . Think iPhone + Broadsheet = Brave New World of Journalism.
Hurry up and invent that contraption. We have to go there. Newspapers are dying off. All of them. Soon. Too soon. And the Next Big Thing isn't ready yet.
Isn't it ironic that most newsapers are printed on what are called " Web Offset Presses" ?. That term is not lost on me.
Newspapers are undergoing a painful and radical transition as the world chooses how it wants to receive its information, news, etc.
My concern is not so much whether newspapers survive -- and I spent nearly 33 years as a newspaper journalist -- but whether the JOURNALISM they produce survives. What many, if not most, bloggers do is not, with all respects, journalism. They comment, they link, but not many of them produce original news reporting. Remember that when newspapers start to disappear and you wonder, gee, where'd the coverage of city hall go?
Nothing can replace having full-time, paid, working reporters and editors keeping a daily eye on government, business, our culture (including, yes, even sports and celebrities).
Until now, the leading model for that has been daily papers, and to a lesser degree, local broadcast TV and radio (who generally lack the staff numbers of daily papers to do as thorough a job, and also are constrained by limits on air time).
There are many things wrong with the way newspapers have been managed -- or MISmanaged -- in recent years, when they missed the significance of the Internet, took painful losses with the rise of CraigsList (classified advertising is, or WAS, the bread-and-butter of every daily paper in America), and suffer now because new generations choose to take delivery of their news in ways other than dead-tree pulp print.
But listen for the whines of posters like those above when newspapers really DO disappear and someone belatedly wonders, hey, where'd the reporting, the watchdog journalism, that unofficial "Fourth Estate" go? Those folks will dearly miss their papers then, even as bad as some of the papers have become in the face of relentless cuts.
The Web's news sites, like this one, are fine, but much of the content is based on a newspaper's original reporting. Same with TV news. How many "citizen journalists" are there who are willing to put in 50 hour weeks investigating stories for little or no pay?
I just hope someone comes up with a business model that works for local and state coverage. Otherwise the crooks and liars are gonna win.
I believe that journalism can be even better without the daily newspapers. The internet is an opportunity for more creative ways to the issues surrounding the world today. It's faster, cheaper, more environmentally friendly etc. People are just so afraid of change. If you just be real and innovative about it then it will all work out.
What the fuck do you mean by that statement? This is just another in the usual stupid articles written about the newspaper business by people who know nothing about the newspaper business.
Newspapers were online 15 fucking years ago, trying to "adapt." They were some of the first online.
The reason newspapers aren't making it is because people want everything for free now and because nobody has ANY money in this economy for ANYTHING.
Newspapers are some of the most innovative "news" sites around. Go click on any reasonable city-sized paper site and see for yourself.
But you won't. Instead, you just take the lazy way out and parrot the wrong assertion that newspapers didn't "adapt."
Fuck you, dumbass American. And have fun living in a Big Brother, fascist society some day soon when there is no more investigative journalism around, keeping a check on power.
After all, costs a little money, having that. Wouldn't want that.
You stupid morons.
Using your stupefied logic, the banking industry has gone bankrupt because banks are too "liberal." The auto industry is bankrupt because cars are too "liberal." And every other fucking business in this country is bankrupt because it is too "liberal."
The problem is YOU, you stupid, idiotic, moronic people.
YOU.
This constant drumbeat of how awful paper newspapers are and why they deserve to die, because they're always too liberal etc., is just absurd.
I worked for a community newspaper and the reporters were bright, hard-working and cared deeply about people they served.
So get off the bandstand of "good riddance." When papers are actually gone, try to get the everyday news that matters -- the tax rate changes, school board elections, crime stats, results of the intramural game, the listing of church suppers and AA meetings. Who is it who will deliver this information?
Or maybe you don't care.
Good luck with your Internet world. You'll need it.
Cuss all you want but half this nation is not liberal.
Too many Newspapers---or more rightly their owners---have totally abrogated their journalistic responsibilities in two major ways.
The first is they took down the firewall between Editorial and Advertising , allowing each to comingle and influence the other. That should be taboo. You most often see this at the smaller papers, the hometown papers , when certain "hard news" stories are not run because of who they'll offend or who might quit advertising. Or certain stories that are run solely to appease advertisers... it runs both ways. This is not good.
But what's worse is the second business model that says somebody---or a corporation---actually owns the News and can control its gathering, editing (censorship ) and dissemination . Or choose not to gather, edit, and publish news. The critical point here is, again , NOBODY owns the News if it is a factoid or story of public interest.
Newspapers in particular and news media in general, have fallen into the trap of doing News as a For Profit venture instead of public service.
This is the problem . That newspapers are losing circulation ,losing revenue, cutting staff , going broke, going extinct, whatever it is that keeps them from reporting hard news these days ...all that is secondary to the issue of Newspapers large and small forgetting why they were doing it in the first place.
It wasn't for the money . Or shouldn't have been. Anyone who's completed the curiculum knows that Journalism is the very lowest paying profession of all thatr equire a four year degree, an internship, and preferably some beat experience to get even an entry level job that pays diddly squat. Profession ? --in name only , but not in salary. Nobody goes into journalism to get rich , like doctors or lawyers students might . Having said that , why is is the lowly reporting staff who always takes the first cuts when owners, the corporation , or the conglomerate demands that expenses be cut ? Good question. You'll have to ask the publishers and the stockholders why they turn to fratricide.
It isn't loss of advertising or competing with the internet that is killing newspapers. The newspapers are doing it to themselves, because they forgot why they were doing journalism in the first place.
Once you accept that the "paper" is going out of Newspaper, we can start all creating Newsgathering , Version 3.0, which currently is in Beta. And I certainly do hope that William Randolph Hearst is rolling in his grave and Rupert Murdoch is getting sober. Should we be bailing out Tribune Corp alongside General Motors ? I don;t see the difference, but in my mind, journalism is a far more important basic industry than automobiles if one or the other were to fail and you had to choose.
We need to work on the lesser publishers and hometown barons and rebuild journalism from the grass roots up . And somehow make it worth the while to do so...
The problem is that Americans in general don't care about the news any more. (What news source to most Americans 40 and younger turn to? It's a trick question: Most Americans 40 and younger turn to no news sources at all. Ninety percent of time spent on the Internet has nothing to do with news -- or, for that matter, with reading.)
We should be impressed newspapers have survived so well.
We are in deep trouble because of the turn to the far-Right by our Media and publications that were formerly "watch dogs" are now doing the exact opposite - supporting the Right.
I feel bad for the state of our Newspapers but after seeing what they have done to our Democracy, I won't be shedding any tears at their financial problems.