The Seattle Post-Intelligencer becomes the nation's largest circulation newspaper to make the jump to digital only starting tomorrow. CJR rightly notes that the fact everyone knew it was coming doesn't make it less shocking. Later in the spring, the Christian Science Monitor will start its new hybrid publication program wherein the daily paper will be digital only and subscribers will receive a glossy weekly magazine to get more in depth coverage. Both models seem doomed to failure.
I was listening to Chuck Klosterman on ESPN Radio this week talk about the news business. He was using player salaries as an example of what's probably wrong with the way we think about news. If Manny signed with the Dodgers for the biggest salary in history, how soon do we need access to that information? Is it true that we have to have it as soon as it's available? Of course not. Yet immediacy is killing print journalism. This has two huge downsides: lack of time to get the story straight and analyze the implications, and a dangerous de-monetizing of journalism. (Who do you think is going to produce all those "free" stories once newspapers offer everything without charge?) There are pieces of information we need with some immediacy: a tornado in my neighborhood, terrorist threats, bombs at my kid's school, an abducted child alert, etc. Knowing the gist of something immediately does not give it the context it needs for real comprehension. But I'm an old fuddy-duddy, apparently, as most of my students disagree with me; our values are stunningly different about immediacy, and their insistence on it transcends axiomatic.
Klosterman also pointed out that the newspaper business made the exact wrong decision every time it felt threatened, first by radio, then television, and finally the Internet. Each time, rather than view itself as the slow-moving, patient, thorough ally of the immediate, they've tried to recreate themselves in the guise of their assumed adversary. USA Today is like a print version of television news. Newspapers are putting more and more (shorter, less thorough) news online and not charging for it. That's a great business model. Kinda like Burger King giving away their burgers because McDonald's makes shittier ones faster. Hey, come read our news, even if you don't pay for it, because it's not as if we have journalists to pay...
I have no idea where this thing is headed. I have faith in people's ability to be innovative though. Someone is going to solve this, and primarily because people want to be informed and someone will want to make money giving people what they want. It's still a beautiful synergy. I just don't know how many journalists are going to be unemployed for how long or how many stories we'll miss or how many large papers will go under before it's solved.
I tend to agree that there isn't very much in the world with a legitimate claim to immediacy. But then there aren't many people my age who don't have a cell phone, so I'm probably an outlier too.
Posted by: Leighton | March 16, 2009 at 02:14 PM
I'm definitely not as informed as you are about the newspaper business. But I think there is another dimension to television and radio and the internets in addition to (but connected with) immediacy that newspapers wrongly tried to emulate. For whatever reason, they largely jettisoned investigation and journalism in favor of merely reporting the he-said/she-said.
The GOP said this today. The Democratic reaction was such and such. End of story. And what they call "analysis" is nothing more than instant reaction. Newspapers could have continued this role and provided a valuable service to uncover, oh maybe, an AIG.
Posted by: Zossima | March 16, 2009 at 04:17 PM
Amanda and I just finished watching the BBC mini-series "State of Play." Really good series, by the way, but about halfway through it, I began to wonder if I was actually watching a fantasy movie ... reporters for a large newspaper doing this incredibly in-depth investigation of a political murder mystery.
Posted by: justin f | March 16, 2009 at 04:23 PM
When you said your students insist on immediacy, I was also thinking that they would have a tendency to think of transparency as an ingredient just as necessary.
If we could feel like we were part of the unfolding story, that might be something worth paying for. It would be quite an experience to follow the unfolding of a good thorough investigative piece. Do you know of any journalists who blog or twitter their way through a big story that they normally would have saved their goodies on?
Does a reporter not really know that she has a story until all the details are no longer too boring to follow?
I also was thinking about the only places I consume, what feels like, investigative journalism stories. The way that This American Life has been treating Gitmo over the last couple of years... and their treatment of the economic environment has been helpful in filtering through and making sense of the complicated. Jon Stewart is another example of investigative journalism being found in an unexpected place for me. Was his outing of CNBC last week this generations version of Murrow?
Posted by: Plano Michae; | March 16, 2009 at 08:23 PM
Polishing before publishing isn't just the process of thinking the matter through; it's also closing off the blind alleys. I can't tell you how many things I briefly, mistakenly attributed to an off-the-grid client while doing a background check. Obviously, in my actual situation, I wouldn't want to publish what is protected by privilege. But if I had been writing a story about him, someone who got distracted and stopped reading my feed halfway through would have completely false ideas about who he is/was, and a good many people completely unrelated to the person would have been dragged into the story for no defensible reason. I'm not even considering the potential for libel suits, and reporters being "encouraged" by generous PR firms to briefly mention their competitors in muckraking stories, only to later say "Oops, blind alley!"
If people like being part of investigations, one obvious solution is for them to take up investigation in their spare time. Lots of interesting background details behind almost every news story are available in the public domain.
Posted by: Leighton | March 16, 2009 at 11:01 PM
How does content licenses and rights currently work for reporters? Is it a shared license with their paper, or does the publisher own everything the reporter produces exclusively?
Posted by: Plano Michael | March 17, 2009 at 09:01 AM
Michael,
I've never worked for a paper that demanded exclusive rights. They may exist, but I've had work appear in two dozen large circulation newspapers and the rights always revert to me, including the stuff I've done for wire services.
Posted by: greg | March 17, 2009 at 09:16 AM
Z,
Klosterman addressed the investigative angle; I should have mentioned that. He did say it was a mistake to move away from that model, as that is the best service the news media can provide: Watergate, Iran Contra, Enron, AIG, etc.
As for the he said/she said model, I'm past sick of it. It assumes all sides are equal in what they are saying and journalists aren't allowed to say, "By the way, that guy is full of shit," even when we and everyone else knows the guy is. I think it was an over-reaction to the disenfranchising and outright muting of some voices. The pendulum has now swung too far.
Posted by: greg | March 17, 2009 at 09:19 AM
The newspaper/magazine business was an early influence in moving towards the "free" economy. Subscription price has never paid for the cost of production. Newspapers were selling eyeballs to advertisers long before the web was invented and comodified the same way. They web learned everything they knew from print news and magazine.
The problem, as you first stated, is one of immediacy.
What if the newspaper had to go back to basics, before the web, and weren't allowed to sell eyeballs? If they sere forced to make money on subscriptions?
With technology, reporters could now sell microsubscriptions online. Dave Barry sells his column through syndication, he's big time. His single feed is pushed out by a bunch of people.
Do you know of a newspaper that would allow people to subscribe to individual reporters feeds. I don't want to subscribe to the whole paper. I could care less. But I would subscribe to your feed for 75 cents per month?
What problems would that model inadvertently create?
Posted by: Plano Michael | March 17, 2009 at 04:42 PM
One nice thing about buying the stories of all the reporters or none is that it keeps the papers--and the reporters--from tracking the specific financial contributions generated by individual stories. If companies like Halliburton bought a few tens of thousands of subscriptions whenever a reporter brought up problems with switching to ethanol energy sources, it could serve as de facto campaign contributions to the media. As the system currently works, there is (or is supposed to be) a wall between editorial policy and ad management, but if the owners had a way of saying "X story affects our bottom line by Y thousands of dollars," it's hard to think that wall would stay intact for long.
Posted by: Leighton | March 17, 2009 at 09:05 PM
I would be OK with that wall crumbling as long as it completely crumbled. If everything about that process was completely transparent, wouldn't that push a reporter to pursue a wider, flatter, less corporate subscription base? Any reporter that had gigantic public subscriptions from specific corporate entities would fight to stay out of the public perception of "in the pocket of" whatever big business.
Newspapers already become owned by a certain political bent (like their brothers on cable news) Is there a reasonable expectation that it will improve if we give the power to the individual journalist to put himself into wide syndication?
Posted by: Plano Michael | March 17, 2009 at 11:35 PM
If everything about that process was completely transparent, wouldn't that push a reporter to pursue a wider, flatter, less corporate subscription base?
I'm not sure why it would. I'm sure there would be individual reporters who would respond like that. But I suspect that most of them would behave like most politicians, who observe that the overwhelming majority of their campaign contributions come from corporations hoping for kinder, gentler regulators and more freedom to do what they like in their markets, and vote accordingly most of the time.
Obama was able to get his funding from the grassroots because he had staff members working full time to fundraise for him. Individual reporters--and most politicians, who aren't running for President--don't have those kind of resources, and corporate donations/subscriptions would make up most of the funding. Looking at what business models newspapers have adopted in the last 10 years, I think this funding would have a corrupting effect on most reporters themselves, and on the remainder by means of pressure from the owners who are looking at shareholder ROI.
Posted by: Leighton | March 18, 2009 at 08:38 AM
So, in the Old Testament tradition of the prophets, we are left with certain kinds of stand up comics to be our best expose' agents.
Posted by: Plano Michael | March 18, 2009 at 06:16 PM
greg,
an article about twitter that relates to your discussion of immediacy, context, and perspecitve
http://open.salon.com/blog/evan_kessler/2009/03/19/twitter_and_the_inevitable_loss_of_perspective
Posted by: brad | March 19, 2009 at 02:01 PM
"With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem."
Here is the rest.
Good stuff.
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/
Posted by: Plano Michael | March 23, 2009 at 08:15 PM
Lindsay Beyerstein argues the case for the public funding of hard news (as opposed to the padding in newspapers like opinion, gossip, fashion and the like). Public funding of BBC seems to work pretty well in Britain; might be worth a shot.
Posted by: Leighton | April 07, 2009 at 11:19 AM
If you work full-time for a newspaper, then the newspaper owns the content.
As far as if you are just a contributor? I don't really know, I'd guess the writer owns the content then.
That said, companies have no bearing on what is reported, unless the management in editorial gives into advertising - which is what we are starting to see a bit, as newspapers are going down the crapper.
Also, I love the internet. Love it. But as a newspaper writer, I'd like to jettison the free web site.
People love their free web sites and say they won't subscribe, but when you can't get news - even Google news - because all of the newspapers are behind pay walls, well, things would probably change.
So, here's hoping newspapers survive, because they are a good-sized industry and it never made sense to me that anyone would root for their demise when it means a bunch of people will lose their jobs, and that newspapers force people to pay for their news.
Why are they giving the product away for free? TV does it and their news agencies are getting hit harder than newspapers as far as layoffs. Charge. Charge. Charge.
Posted by: Craig Craker | June 29, 2009 at 09:02 PM