This isn’t about logic, it’s about money. Maybe people SHOULD be willing to pay for it, but the evidence says they are not. If customers demand something for free, you can’t argue them into paying for it - you either have to sell something they ARE willing to pay for, or you have to do something else different.
The New York Times does syndicate - many of the articles in my local paper come from there. In fact, I think it might be fair to say that newspapers invented outsourcing. What else is Reuters, the AP, and the syndicates?
The real danger for newspapers is that they are going to cut themselves into irrelevance. The reason I still get the Times delivered is that my local paper feels it doesn’t have the space to run the full story, very often. According to Maureen Dowd, they have outsourced layout to India. I believe it - one headline put Oregon in the MidWest. They also edit with a paper cutter, stopping stories when the space if filled, sometimes in the middle of sentences. We actually stopped our subscription to the local rag, and only started it again with such a good deal that we saved more from the circulars and coupons than we were paying the get the paper delivered. But if the quality of local papers continues to deteriorate, those who don’t care about local issues will go to the web, where they can get the complete story. Once you go there, why bother even visiting the web site of your local paper?
Professional journalism died a long time ago in the USA.
All this is true but I don’t think the effectiveness of online advertising is fixed. For example Google has greatly increased the size of the market through AdSense and AdWords and there are probably other innovations out there waiting to be created. Online advertising has one big advantage over other media; it can be targetted to the reader which, if it works, means that the reader actually wants to read the ad which makes it much more valuable to the advertiser. Over time as advertisers figure out the medium, online advertising should become more lucrative.
The same reason they read blogs, message boards and Wikipedia; some people who write for free do it well and newspapers are in a good position to pick only the very best who are worth reading. I believe the concept of citizen journalism is quite popular in some countries like South Korea. Volunteers won’t totally replace professionals but they can help generate some content at a lower cost leaving the pros to focus on in- depth reporting.
This model is already in place when it comes to political magazines; for example Mother Jones is run by a non-profit. Some other political magazines consistently run losses which are paid by their owners so in effect they are like non-profits. I don’t expect non-profits to actually publish newspapers but they could generate a lot of the content which has traditionally come in newspapers which could then be aggregated by other websites.
This is all good stuff, really, and I’m all in favor of anything that will extend the life of professional journalism. Especially with regard to online revenue models, great, I hope you’re right. I’m sure some news organizations do better at this than others (although innovations seem to spread pretty rapidly, as far as I can tell).
The interns and volunteers thing still escapes me. The blogs that people actually read are generally supported by advertising, aren’t they? Aren’t these bloggers professional (or trying to be) and attempting to make a living at it? And if they are any good, why would a content creator want to do it for free as an intern or volunteer? Wikipedia is sort of self-regulated, isn’t it, to keep the stupid to a minimum? And I don’t know anyone who reads message boards as a source of news, except insofar as it might provide links to real articles. I’ve certainly learned not to take much even here at face value.
Finally, I think there is a huge difference between politically-motivated magazines like Mother Jones, which have a very strong slant to their stories as well as their editorial positions, and general-circulation newspapers which generally strive for some objectivity in their news reporting, whatever may be on the editorial page. If newspapers do their job right and present the truth as best they can, they don’t please anyone enough to support them as a charity, but they won’t alienate folks so much they cancel subscriptions in protest.
On the other hand, if you are saying that non-profit organizations might support professional objective journalism in some form, I think that would be great. I might even contribute to such an organization. But I doubt if it will do much to extend the life of newspapers.
Roddy
A big source of newspaper revenue was job ads. Monster took that over. Ads for selling merchandise were lost to Craigs list. it is a tough road for them.