Many of you already have heard or read about the closing of The Rocky Mountain News. I'm not sure there's any better way to document the pain caused by the loss of a local journalism institution like this one than to hear it in the words of its now-former employees. Toward that end, click on the following link: http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/rocky_mountain_bye.php?page=all.
If you have as much respect for journalism and journalists as I do (and I confess to having a lot), the comments made by the staffers for the Rocky make for tough reading. I suspect that many of them, if not most, will find other jobs. Some, if they have not done so already, will enter the burgeoning field of blogging, as others have done;-). But the fact that the Internet has become an alternative for many print journalists should force us all to reflect on the future of journalism, and the impact of the Internet on the profession.
As more of us get an ever-increasing amount of information and opinion electronically, newspapers are expanding their online editions, at the expense of their print versions. In fact, it is entirely fair to say that newspapers, in their traditional form, are literally dying by inches. My hometown newspaper, The Baltimore Sun, has shrunk so much from its former broadsheet dimensions that it is easy to imagine it becoming a tabloid in the near future. It is no less easy to imagine it disappearing altogether sometime after that. Such may be the fate of the Seattle Post-Intelligencier; the Hearst Corporation has announced that it will become an online-only publication unless a buyer for the print version emerges. The Christian Science Monitor, formerly a daily newspaper, is now only a weekly in print; it uses its Web site to publish daily news.
Should we worry about this? After all, isn't this just the consequence of the emergence of a new technology, much as movable type once displaced clerks with quill pens? Unfortunately, I think the answer is "Yes." Online newspapers, for the most part, emerged during the early days of the Internet, when it was a medium that could only be accessed for limited periods of time from PCs. Most of these online journals were electronic versions of existing newspapers, choosing to put their print content online. The cost of doing so was minimal, the site created a new source of advertising revenue, and everybody was happy.
Fast forward to now: the Internet can be accessed from almost anywhere through an increasingly varied array of portable devices, at relatively minimal cost. This means fewer readers for print journals, as well as less revenue from circulation and advertising. On the other hand, even in their increasingly dessicated state, they still bring in more revenue than their electronic cousins. In the process, they continue to effectively subsidize the costs of those cousins. This is the business paradox in which most newspapers (and news magazines as well) now find themselves. The print versions should be allowed to die the natural death that a newer, superior medium has prepared for them. But the financial role that they play in subsidizing that medium prevents them from dying.
Like it or not, print news papers are going to die anyway. No enterprise can continue to hemorrhage money indefinitely. As a consequence, journalism faces one of two possible futures. In one, formal news gathering organizations, including editors and bureaus, will cease to exist, and online journalists en masse will fill the gap, subsidized by advertising and, perhaps, alternative employment. This might have a kind of Utopian appeal for some. But it is not likely to produce the quality of journalism that society not only needs but expects. Some news makers and news events (certainly those that involve the Federal government, for example) are so inherently big and complex that they cannot be reported adequately or at all by one or more individuals acting independently. They have to be covered by a variety of journalists with different skills and backgrounds, and they have to have someone--an editor, a publisher, call him or her what you will--directing their work and shaping their product.
But news organizations cost money. And, if they are to have a truly national or international scope, they require more money than Web sites can produce from advertising revenue alone. If that were not the case, most publishers would have already abandoned their print editions by now. The seemingly obvious answer is to charge a fee for access to the Web versions, but those newspapers that have experimented with this (i.e., The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times) have met with more resistance from their readers than they could handle. It seems more likely than not that the concept of free access to individual Web sites is so ingrained in our culture that not even sheer economic or journalistic necessity can dislodge it.
It may be the case that the appropriate economic model can be found in cable television. Currently, cable services provide access to a number of channels for a flat fee, and charge additional fees for so-called premium or on-demand services. Perhaps one or more news organizations could "bundle" their offerings as part of some sort of premium package, for which users could pay an additional flat, monthly fee and thereby gain access to a wide variety of online newspapers and magazines, which they could surf at their leisure. Or newspapers could go back to doing what they did in the early days of the Internet: offering their content directly through the online service itself, with the service paying for the content and spreading the costs among all of their subscribers and advertisers, not just the ones using the online publications.
Or, in a worst-case scenario, newspaper publishers could just bite the bullet, shut down their hard-copy editions, and say to their reading public "If you want to find us, go on the Web--for a price. This is what the newspaper is now. Subscribing to our Web site is no different from subscribing to the old-fashioned paper. If you subscribe now, you'll pay less than you would later, and the longer your subscription, the less you'll pay. You may not want to 'read the paper' this way, but the alternative is no paper at all, including no local news coverage. It's a world of choices, and we've now made one. We do so recognizing that you are free to do the same, and hope that you will stay with us."
No one, including me, knows which of these scenarios is likely. But, since newspapers cannot lose money forever, one of them is going to happen. The rewards will fall to the publishers who recognize this fact, and attempt to embrace one or more of these alternatives. Here's hoping that one or more of them do so soon. I love newspapers, and I hate seeing them die piece by piece. We are all better off if "print journalism" decides where it is going--and soon.
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