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If your newspaper were to print the amount of news I peruse everyday on the internet, it would be so encyclopedic and you'd need a forklift to bring it back to your living room and a NYC landfill to dispose of a week's subscription. Newspapers are as archaic to the internet as stone tablets were to newspapers.
Reminds me of my grandpa who loved Studebakers into the 1960s simply because he remembered them being hot cars in the 1920s.
The difference, as an earlier poster pointed out, is that in reading a newspaper page by page the reader will find a variety of stories and stories that they were not seeking but appeared in front of them. The internet model includes those stories being sought by the reader or directed to him by algorithms based on past usage but does not have the depth of random discovery one finds in print.
My reading pattern is generally that I will first access the website of the daily newspaper often late at night and see fifty or so stories across varied subjects. The following day I will read the entire newspaper and find many more stories of interest that would otherwise not come to my attention at all. The internet is then helpful in gathering more information from different sources to maintain an independent viewpoint on issues that may be of interest.
I don't find your grandfather or Studebakers relevant to the discussion, nor your analogies. Newspapers need not be "archaic to the internet" unless one has decided that the internet is properly the benchmark by which other media are to be judged. I don't.
When I moved to Tucson last summer I decided to give the local paper a chance, but I stopped subscribing within 2 months, way too thin on newsworthy news. I subscribe to The Economist and what more do I need, a magazine you can chew on for days!
The Las Vegas Review Journal was bought out by Sheldon Adelson's son-in-law shortly before I left that city and the change was apparent from the start. Anti-Monorail extension, anti-light rail, and God forbid, no article even faintly critical of Israel!
In lieu of a newspaper today, I'm getting more and more magazines. Great way to fill the void!
My reading pattern is generally that I will first access the website of the daily newspaper often late at night and see fifty or so stories across varied subjects. The following day I will read the entire newspaper and find many more stories of interest that would otherwise not come to my attention at all. The internet is then helpful in gathering more information from different sources to maintain an independent viewpoint on issues that may be of interest.
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In Connecticut newspapers, I would be hard pressed to find 5 stories a day, news worthy, that were NOT wire story links.
People don't get that. I mean, companies should take care of their employees. But eventually, you have to cut your losses. Newhouse lacks the vision or wherwithal to completely overhaul the family biz into a cutting-edge media juggernaut. Asking them to throw good money after bad is just, well, naive.
Two or three generations from now, the Newhouse fortune will likely have evaporated into dissolute living, petty family squabbles, and malinvestment in fly-by-night schemes by family scions who are in love with their big ideas but lack the worth ethic or brains to actually pull it off.
I worked for a Newhouse newspaper for 24 years. When the internet was introduced, we watched our revenue plummet. The pressure to offset the losses was enormous. When I finally realized that I was needing medication for stress and depression, I knew that my days of trying to keep lining the pockets of the Newhouse family were over. I retired early and have never been happier.
And you are so right about the dreadful Newhouse digital presence that hasn't changed in 15 years. Terrible decision making from the top down. I hope I live to see the day that the Newhouse fortune dries up.
I would offer that a big part of the problem behind newspapers' decline was that they were run by newspaper people.
Mind you, being owned by a hedge fund is no picnic either. But until ten years ago, I never encountered a newspaper that didn't behave as if it were still 1975 and CNN had not gone on the air yet. They pretty much functioned with the insular mindset of a monopoly, thinking that they were public necessities such as the power company or the water works.
It's important to consider that the entire history of business since the deregulation of airlines has been the destruction of the traditional distribution channel. The break up Ma Bell. Wal-Mart coming out of backwoods Arkansas to completely steamroll Sears and JC Penney. The iPod and iTunes. And, relevant to newspapers--the Internet. Yet, because they were run by newspaper people, they weren't aware of the titanic shifts going on in the business world. Or refused to see. Or, more to the point, lacked the understanding of what they were seeing. Just like the folks in the car industry right now, they blithely thought themselves immune to what they were witnessing.
Newspapers like to ascribe to themselves the quality of intellectual rigor. After all, you have a bunch of writers pecking away at keyboards as the sole reason people buy it. However, at its core, a newspaper is nothing more than a gigantic system, a funnel where words, images, and advertisements pour in one end, and spit it into a finished product on the other. It shouldn't matter whether the news is a rolled-up wad of newsprint in the driveway, or something read on the laptop while drinking your morning coffee. But newspaper people continued to think in the most archaic and hidebound ways. The papers I dealt with literally regarded the internet as nothing more than a fad. Why? Because they were newspaper people who couldn't imagine that people would get their news from any other source. One of my clients snorted when I mentioned TV, "Why that's a lesser medium." But that lesser medium was stealing eyeballs and ad revenue. At one point, classified advertising constituted 35% of a newspaper's revenue. Yet newspapers sat there like dinosaurs watching the meteor streaking in while sites such as EBay and Craigslist made hay. One would have thought that they would put every dime they had into developing some kind of digital response. Nope. The online product they eventually developed was miserable, full of bugs and never worked right.
I remember sitting in a meeting with one of the Advance paper's leadership. The entire point of the summit meeting was how to move the television section of the paper from Friday to Sunday. Okay, first thing's first. This was 2000 and anyone with a two-digit IQ wasn't using the newspaper's TV section in the first place. They would just hit the Guide button on their remote controls and see what was on. Or look online. But there were 20 people from the newspaper in the meeting thinking this would solve all their problems. I kid you not.
One of the brighter reps for the paper threw me a softball question on what I thought they should do. "Scrap it entirely and throw your entire budget into helping people understand why they need a newspaper in the first place." I pointed to their declining circulation numbers to show how they were hemorrhaging readers, particularly for people under 50. "Move the calendar forward ten years..."
And I was interrupted by someone saying, "Oh, don't say that to the publisher. He doesn't want to see the circulation numbers." That should tell you everything you want to know right there. Even then, they continued obsessing over what variation of the 13-weeks-$14.99 offer would be the silver bullet for their declining revenues. Either that or how to cook the books on their circulation numbers to justify their existence to people who create FSIs.
In once sense, you're absolutely correct. Newspapers' survival hinged on one thing and one thing only: Being the indispensable source of local news and information. Unfortunately, newspaper management and the newsrooms alike were slow to understand that--if they understood it at all. After all, in every daily there was an editor who wanted to write Big Picture editorials about Big Events as opposed to pedestrian stuff about the local councilman being on the take because he jimmied the local zoning ordinances for a buddy.
As a result, every single one of them wasted precious resources trying to be the end-all, be-all information source for their readers, covering international entertainment news, international news, and everything else they could see online or cable. Instead, the sole hope of newspapers is the dogged pursuit of engaging readers with news that is immediately relevant to them in their every day lives. That means going to school boards and covering crime, not worrying about what Lady Gaga is up to. For that there's Buzzfeed.
That newspaper I mentioned earlier? They went to three days a week for a metro exceeding one million people. That is just an absolute crime. A shame, because had they listened to people who weren't newspaper people, they might be doing a lot better today.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BobNJ1960
Great post. As a man raised Roman Catholic, I adored the movie Spotlight. As a Fordham University grad whose radio station and alumni are known well in news circles, I was even more enamored the Boston Globe management got it. One could easily argue a city its size would lose the Globe as it was long run (terms of staff size) w/o the decades long Spotlight Team. RCC story came into its lens over a decade past its inception.
I fully agree newspapers run in a dumb manner-ignoring the business they are, but while counter-intuitive, long-term expensive investments like the f/t SpotLight team are what can save major US papers.
NY times, pre 2000, also would allow 4-6 reporters to spend MONTHS on a single story in analogous ways to Globe's RCC story, and with equal pages devoted to it when ready.
But to fund a SpotLight, it first takes a management team with the guts and the track record to show short-term investors why their long-term success is tied directly to less steallar short-term profits.
PS: But we also must acknowledge the shameless behavior of the newsprint media in the 2016 campaign as DNC puppets are also making their bad business situation far worse. A.M. Rosenthal would have properly fired the entire times staff engaged in those horrific practices. In doing so, he would have helped the Times for generations. Unbiased is not conditional on opinions. You are either an unbiased journalist, or a trashy journalist.
I would like to know if ANY medium to large city papers are not left leaning? Seems kind of silly to me to run left when probably the majority of subscribers are moderate or right leaning? Older people are more likely to still subscribe. I still get the Tribune and my husband wanted me to cancel it but I haven't yet. I am sure one day, they will shove me over the edge and I will do it.
Which has substituted quality, depth and integrity for "the maximum amount of crap we can repeat the most quickly."
Newspapers - traditional journalism - always had two arms, fast reporting of daily events, and long-term investigation of serious issues and complex situations. The latter has all but vanished on our continuous rating- and click-driven news cycle.
IMO, the quality of traditional journalism has been going down hill for the last several years. Misspellings, bad grammar, leaving out important information (who, what, when, where) etc. Of course, I only know about our local paper.
IMO, the quality of traditional journalism has been going down hill for the last several years. Misspellings, bad grammar, leaving out important information (who, what, when, where) etc. Of course, I only know about our local paper.
This is about like observing that the sky is blue.
Small papers in particular have nowhere near the quantity or quality of staff they once prized. "Reporting" is increasingly done using what was once a despised process, just rewriting PRs, government bulletins and official handouts. Or, worse, reporting on events by watching them on TV.
I fear the collapse of genuine, dedicated journalism more than most other declines in this sorry era.
I worked for a Newhouse newspaper for 24 years. When the internet was introduced, we watched our revenue plummet. The pressure to offset the losses was enormous. When I finally realized that I was needing medication for stress and depression, I knew that my days of trying to keep lining the pockets of the Newhouse family were over. I retired early and have never been happier.
And you are so right about the dreadful Newhouse digital presence that hasn't changed in 15 years. Terrible decision making from the top down. I hope I live to see the day that the Newhouse fortune dries up.
To be truthful, my involvement with them felt like something out of Waiting For Godot. Just three long years of bad decisions and great ideas torpedoed by know-nothings. These were people who shouldn't have been entrusted with a box of kitchen matches, let alone the operation of any large media conglomerate. When it came time to potentially renew my contract, I named an exorbitant price with the full expectation that they would throw up, thereby ending the relationship voluntarily. Life's too short.
I cannot tell you how many times I heard the phrase, "Well, that's how we always have done it." And when I would point out that how they've always done it was hemorrhaging readers, you'd have thought I said something distasteful.
Newspapers do have some smart people working for them, but those were the exceptions. Instead from the editors to the circulation department to advertising sales to the publisher up in his parquet-lined office, the personnel was mostly a bunch of cyphers with a few sad misfits of decent ability who could think beyond their daily to-do list. So if you have a building filled to the rafters with tactical thinkers who can't look ahead further than the Sunday edition, you really aren't going to be up to facing the strategic challenges of a changing media landscape.
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