Joe Gandelman once made his living as a reporter. Over the years he worked for a number of papers including the San Diego Union-Tribune both here and overseas. Some time ago he decided to desert the sinking ship and seek his bliss but he retains a vigorous if sorrowful interest in his former profession, in some ways not unlike the feelings one has (I’m told) towards a former spouse. This morning Joe posted a catalog of woe for print journalism:
*The venerable Christian Science Monitor, even with its heavy subsidization from its Church, will no longer be a paper newspaper but only an online newspaper.
*The San Diego Union-Tribune here in San Diego, CA (my alma mater) is up for sale, limited buyouts were offered, and a slew of sometimes-legendary newspaper people who got them or didn’t get them have left the building. Those who remain and didn’t get buyouts could eventually be laid off when the paper sells.
*Cutbacks are underway at the L.A. Times. The paper doesn’t look the same on Sunday: the paper used to have a world-class Sunday opinion section. It is now a shadow of what it was (if it appears as a section anymore, or more than two pages).
*Florida’s Palm Beach Post cut 300 positions this summer and is expected to axe 300 more by next year.
Read the whole thing.
I’ve read some reports that the AP may collapse within the the year. Unlike some I can’t rejoice in this. Coverage of overseas news in the United States is pathetic as it is and if the Associate Press, the co-op that provides national, international, and even local coverage for hundreds or even thousands of newspapers, goes under it will be that much worse.
The Internet, the blogosphere, and citizen journalism could conceivably provide something much more complete and comprehensive but it’s not there yet. Few bloggers really do reporting and it would take thousands or tens of thousands of citizen journalists of some sort all over the world to fill the need that the wire services are doing. It would also take something a thousand times bigger, faster, more dynamic, and, necessarily, more customizable than link aggregators like, say, memeorandum, to do the trick.
I doubt that will be possible until Internet 2.
AP is going to cut its workforce by 10 percent next year.
The business model whereby world, national, and local news comes to you on a folded-up two-pound package of newsprint and ink tossed on your doorstep in the morning by a 9-year-old on a bike is dead.
Unlike other dead business models — railroads, for instance — what is killing it does not replace it or do better what the old thing did. Like you say, nothing now replaces it.
I’m going to be laid off or fired within two years. If there was that other thing, I could go there and take these 25 years of skills with me, and make that thing work. But as I look out, there’s no “there” to go.
Don’t forget, too, that you would need some very good new editors to sift through all the dreck that those thousand of citizen journalists would turn up (since for every good chunk of news you’d probably get a whole lot of gossip, hearsay, and junk).
I’m wondering if we’re not seeing the slow death of the advertisement revenue-supported business model for newspapers. If I recall correctly, before the mid- 19th century, most major newspapers were largely dependent on subscriptions, only changing to being supported by ad-revenue later on. If you got continued shrinking of the print subscriptions and advertising revenue (a real possibility since the current and next generation probably won’t even read print newspapers on the bus and train), then at some point the bigger newspapers will probably say “Well, we’re going to lose a lot of online viewers, but we need the subscription cash” and require a subscription (I’m wondering if this is why the Wall Street Journal hasn’t given up their subscription requirement).
I’ve often wondered if some new publication will try to harness the best of both worlds. Instead of a central office, hire (well-vetted) bloggers on a jobber or contractor basis to work in their geographical area and report in via computer. They would not receive benefits such as health insurance, etc., but in return for being paid by the piece they would be permitted to use their work and contacts for their own blogs, etc. as well. This would eliminate the expense of the “toe touch” and could also put developing,important local stories into the news cycle more efficiently. (For example, apply this model to the coverage of Kent State.) Overall editing and management of various sections could also be done online, and the final product appear chiefly online, but also in a print-on-demand edition for special subscribers.
No travel bills, no expensive office buildings, no benefits budget.
Of course, I can see where this might not make money, either. Just wondering.
You need editors — gatekeepers — to weed out the dreck. And you need grunts to do the reporting.
But you need more than that. You need, behind them, a formidable institutional presence, one that can fight off harrassment lawsuits and libel threats, one that can seek injunctions and subpoenas to shake loose public records. One that can protect the process.
You need an institution with pockets deep enough to pay wages for three reporters to go digging for a month for a story that may or may not be there. To pay them whether it pans out or not.
No gang of bloggers is going to have that.
Brett is right: It’s the business model that’s dead. The odd marriage of classified ads, local news gathering, and department store inserts has died.
What’s not dead is the need for steady, reliable reporting on local communities. It’s dying with the business model, though, and nothing is replacing it.
Subscriptions built early 19th century newspapers, but it was the free use of the federal mails that allowed them to happen. They did nor generally report local news. They recycled political speeches and produced homegrown political material. The editor customarily also ran a side business (often via political connections) in job printing and stationery, which covered his expenses, and he was quietly subsidized by the local political powers.
The current model of newspaper journalism has little in common with that.
Big, national newspapers like the New York Times and the WSJ cannot control their online content. It is absurd for them to try to firewall it.
Local and small-city newspapers, however, can and should do so.
Local stories like the Kent State shooting happen about once a generation in most communities. Local stories like the corrupt zoning hearing board happen about once a month. Those are the stories that matter to the community. No one in the next county will give a rat’s ass about them or want to see them on Pajamas Media. You still haven’t replaced journalism.
Who the hell is going to do this without health insurance, I’d like to know.
Well, I agree that absorbing bloggers as distance-reporters isn’t the entire solution. I’m just suggesting that it may become part of the solution. The distance-network idea isn’t meant to “replace journalism” so much as cut costs and improve flexibility. It would at least cut into travel costs.
(As for no insurance- well, take a look at how many employers in all fields are either cutting it or no longer offering much of it. In order for newspapers to survive, they might have to as well.)
I wasn’t suggesting a mob of bloggers could somehow replace journalism- just that the blogging model could be part of the solution.
Bloggers react to news. When they want to start sitting through school board meetings at night and county committee meetings in the morning and read the police blotter in the afternoon — for no pay, much less no insurance — we’ll talk about it.
Oh! Now I see what the problem is. I didn’t communicate my idea properly. No wonder. Here, let me try again:
What I meant was not to reassign news reporting to a bunch of bloggers; what I meant was to use blogging as the model. Here’s what I mean:
reporters permanently on the ground in a given location, reporting to editors, etc. via online connections. No flying people out to given locations; take advantage of who’s there already. (Remember Jayson Blair? This system might help prevent a repeat.) The constant flow of information back to the ‘hub’ would naturally be sorted through by trained editors- who also, btw, wouldn’t necessarily have to live in high-expense areas if they edited online- sort of like the group blogs one sees.
This doesn’t mean hiring bloggers at random or abandoning organized editing- it just means using them in a different, potentially cheaper way.
The newspaper industry at the moment reminds me of a novice swimmer suddenly tossed into the deep end of the pool- it is so panicked and rigid that it’s sinking like a stone. I hear plenty of newspaper professionals claiming to want new ideas, but it seems like whenever they are presented by anyone other than an insider, they are rejected out of hand. Vehemently. Often accompanied by insults.
WRT to your comment that no one else gives a ‘rat’s ass’ about ‘local’ news, remember that Jena started as a local story. So did 3 Mile Island. So did Buffalo Creek. And a frequent complaint heard these days about newspapers is that they don’t seem to get outside their bubble and follow up on stories that readers are interested in, or take fresh angles.
Now, don’t get the idea that I don’t respect newspapers, because I certainly do. I wouldn’t try to imagine ways to help them if I didn’t.
I think you might work a little harder at respecting bloggers. There are some out there that deserve respect. And yes, some do sift thru unsexy materials on a regular basis. Look at Brendan Loy with his weather blogging, for example. And there are other bloggers conducting their own interviews. These are things out there that could be harnessed instead of shunned.
Would this model solve all the problems? Not hardly. I don’t pretend to have that answer for a red-hot minute. But journalism has a long history of learning from new, unfamiliar media- radio, for example, then TV. I’d like to see some hybrid of professional news work and blogging. Not only might it help newspapers, it could raise the standards of bloggers. And maybe harness some new talent that might otherwise go to waste.
Bloggers and newspapers really need to stop seeing each other as the enemy. It would be a win-win all around.
You’re thinking of big journalism. NYT, WaPo, WSJ. Those will survive. I’m thinking of the newspaper in Altoona or Erie or Roanoke or Augusta or Forth Smith. They don’t have people living in high-rent districts. They don’t send people more than 40 or 50 miles for anything except a high school state championship football game.
They are the ones that are going to die. They’re already dead, in fact. Their staffs have been cut so deep — and always the people who did the work that transcended daily headlines were the first to go — they’re running on nothing now but inertia and reputation.
Who’s going to watch the state capitals when they’re gone? The county governments? The local factories? By the time the New York Times sends a Jayson Blair down to screw the pooch (even when they do show up, they bring truckloads of condescention and get all the local details wrong), the crisis already has become a disaster.
My current boss was a reporter when Three Mile Island broke. It was a “local story” for all of about 15 minutes. There hasn’t been a story like that around here since 1979. But if it happens again, there will be a medium in place to cover it. And you cover it differently when you’re the local newspaper. The New York Times isn’t going to bother to print exhaustive page-after-page of escape route traffic conditions and refugee center addresses and the names of people looking for lost relatives.
Ten years from now? What will there be?
To say a bunch of bloggers who got up that morning intending to do something else that day can galvanize themselves into a newsgathering organization and bring that story to the world when it breaks is like saying we don’t need an army because if any other nation invades America all the citizens can just go get guns and become a military force and fight them.