AMERICAN NEWSPAPERS, by and large, have been a slowly dying institution for the past quarter-century or so. Most U.S. cities have only one daily these days, and a lot of these dailies have experienced stagnant circulations and revenues.
Instead of revitalizing their operations, many publishers have expended a lot of energy cutting costs, dumbing-down their products, and tailoring their coverage to ever-more-precise demographic targets.
Go to any out-of-town-newspaper store or big public library, and you’ll see the same set of vapid formulae practiced from approximately coast to coast. Big color pictures of dumb “human interest” topics. Polls, surveys and “front porch forums” designed to find out just what the affluent suburban 25-49 female market feels about the issues of the day. Editorials that courageously challenge citizens to muster up the ol’ civic oomph by supporting everything the local Chamber of Commerce wants this year.
And, every now and then, Op-Ed whine-pieces about the sorry fact that Americans just aren’t reading newspapers like they used to (total circulation hasn’t kept up with population growth for many years now)–and how it just goes to show you how stupid Americans are getting, especially Those Kids Today.
In a classic example of institutional self-misdiagnosis, publishers apparently continue to believe they can stem the tide if they only do exactly what they’re doing now, only more extremely. Even shorter, more meaningless articles! Even fewer original voices! Even blander layouts!
Britain’s The Economist magazine has a long, thorough look at the press’s sorry state, here and across the pond; paying particular attention to the latest threat to newsprint. You guessed right, it’s that bad ol’ Internet; which is starting to muscle in on newspapers’ most precious ad markets (classifieds) and editorial attractions (sports and stock stats, entertainment listings, movie-star gossip).
The Economist piece was published before Microsoft announced it’s going to sell off its Sidewalk local-entertainment-listings sites, which cost a lot to keep updated and which no longer fit MS’s online-business model.
But the magazine did make one on-target point in its description of newspapers’ essential nature:
“A newspaper is a bundle of goods and revenue streams brought together to amortise the cost of a printing press, and to pay for newsprint and a distribution network. The goods are the different editorial sections, stock prices, the weather forecast; the revenue streams are classified advertising, display advertising, promotions and the cover price.
“…Get rid of the need for physical inputs, however, and the economics of the business changes completely… niche publishers can pick off speciality areas of content–the weather, say, or the stock market–and build a business around them. Classified advertisers can set up their own sites where prices to advertisers are likely to be lower because they do not have to pay for the physical inputs or subsidise the content.
“The newspaper, it turns out, was a hundred different businesses rolled into one; and, now that the economic glue that held them together has dissolved, they could fall apart.”
Defenders of newsprint will argue that having a little something for everyone, without meeting any particular reader’s full needs, is a local paper’s strength; that it focuses the attention of a whole community (or at least the advertiser-desired slices of a community) around a single set of topics and concerns. We (or at least the demographically advantagous of us) all laugh at Dilbert, cry at JFK Jr.’s tragic demise, get angry about Serbian atrocities, root for our local sports teams, and wisely compare the growth trends of different mutual funds.
But that’s just another of the obsolete things about the corporate news media (conservatives like to call it “the liberal news media,” but those of us who really are liberals know better).
America’s not a one-size-fits-all society anymore, and one-size-fits-all newspapers just won’t work in it anymore. (At least European countries have national papers targeted to appeal to all sorts of different audiences.)
So there will be Websites and specialty print media for readers who really care about all the side stuff newspapers skim over (business, sports, lifestyle guides, and so on).
But what of local papers’ supposed central reason for existence–those two to five pages’ worth of local “general news,” letters, and opinions?
Those could easily be covered in a much smaller (and less wasteful) package. Say, something the size of the Christian Science Monitor, or the “alternative daily” tabloids popping up in such scattered spots as Aspen. Because these papers would be small, they wouldn’t need to own their own printing and distribution infrastructures. Because they’d need readers who really wanted to read them, and because they’d need less operating capital, they could take stands their local business leaders might not always approve of.
Instead of killing daily print media, the Net and the Net-influenced decentralized culture could help bring it back to life.
TOMORROW: I mistake a poster advertising “Butch Erotica” for one advertising “Butoh Erotica.”
ELSEWHERE: Frat boys report receiving unwanted sexual advances almost as often as initiating them…. The ultimate crusade against all things “leftist”…. The end of the Woodstock mystique? One can only hope; considering the conventional media wisdom on the original festival reduces a decade of necessary social turmoil to a single image of affluent college kids sowing their wild oats….
