Proposal: What should newspapers be?

Great Debates
1

I noticed the relevant BBQ Pit thread, which wasn’t very pitworthy, and thought I’d put a hopefully more constructive note here.

Newspapers, in the old form, are dying. Not every, but in many places. Oddly enough, they are dying, IMHO, of their own success.

Once upon a time, newspapers were almost perfect commodities. You might have several in a small city, and many more in a large one (Berlin famously once had around 6 major newsrags, and God-knows-how-many lessers). These were smaller, more focused newspapers, who sold aggressively out and about town. Newsboys hawked papers because you made sales by going to the people.

Over time, papers bought up each other and constantly tried to expand their sections. The concept of a huge “global paper” like USA Today, or even the London Times or New York Times, is a fairly new invention. Even the city-based daily is pretty new, a result of expansion and competition out. The problem is that the expansion over time stopped a lot of alternative voices out there, and the journalists became as comfortable as the people they supposedly afflicted. They got very, very politically “set”. Journalists have very little diversity of opinion. More and more are shutting down foreign offices and doing less and less news and more opinion, and mixing the two.

That was survivable as long as people had no other choice. The first guns off the bow was TV news, but that wasn’t a huge, because it was often folded into the same organizations or used the same sources as the newspapers, and couldn’t deliver the same amount of content. But that was only the first threat.

The internet was the next big one, and it was a doozy, and it’s not just killing newspapers, it’s butchering them. Local people can create news items and deliver them worldwide on demand. You can get dozens of alternative views of the same subject. Even if you don’t go looking for it, you are much more likely to find diversity of opinion. “Professional news” may be more likely to expose people to views they disagree with, but only on a shallow and unengaging level, and it’s only a different orthodoxy.

But how could they survive?

My proposal is simple: The Kindle. I wouldn’t want to buy books on it. That defeats the purpose of a book, and the books will last a heck of a lot longer than a Kindle and subscriptions. But what about news items? Perfect!

A Kindle, or similar device, can accept cellular delivery of news from several sources anywhere in the world. I can buy my local news and national news as I prefer, and take it when I please.

Moreover, it will probably have good effects on newspaper composition. While the Kindle does aspire to a book-like interface, people making media for it will probably try for shorter articles. They’d want to aim for a greater audience of a growing medium (and hence leave bias at the door). Even if not, it’ll be easier to get into the business and win marketshare based on quality production.

2

You need to address the issue of revenue, and how a Kindle-based newspaper would generate some. The Kindle is hardly unique as a device that can get hold of content from around the world, and most of the many current ones get it at little or no cost. So what would make people likely to pay substantial subscription fees, when they have thus far largely rejected these?

Of course, existing newspapers have long depended on advertising revenues for a large fraction of their income. How will that work with a Kindlepaper? I don’t know of any strong sentiment that it’s worth paying a lot to distribute ads that way. Classified ads definitely work better when indexable and searchable, but Craig’s List is already doing a good job of this for next to nothing.

There may be some potential to this approach, but it doesn’t look to be a slam dunk in terms of financial viability.

3

I personally still enjoy getting the paper. I may browse to CNN or Yahoo to glance at the headlines and read a story or two, but I don’t read every story I come across. My newspaper has many more stories than I would come across online. I enjoy reading more in-depth stories of what I may have glanced at online. I enjoy reading the local news items. There is still a lot I like about the newspaper.

What I think we’ll see emerge is a few national papers (a-la USA Today) that get bundled with your local paper. Your local newspaper office will become strictly about local issues. So you may get the NY Times national edition with a section or two for your local issues like city council, school board, school scores, etc. Perhaps you could even select which national edition you want bundled with your paper.

I think it’s a poor use of resources for my local paper to put together sections for national/world news, sports, entertainment, etc. By focusing only on local issues, they will need fewer resources. They wouldn’t even need to include the local section 7 days a week.

By having the big papers get bigger, they’ll be able to afford to pay reporters around the world. By having small papers get smaller, they can focus on the local issues. I think this is the way papers will survive with shrinking ad revenue.

4

People do pay for newspapers. IMHO, the basic and unstoppable reasons that papers have declined is the decline of useful news and the omnipresence of bias. But see below.

I don’t know if the Kindle supports ads (or if the licensing prohibits it), but presumably it could. If not now, then later.

What builds from this is an almost-free paper (with a nominal fee or none at all). You can build general-purpose advertising revenue, that increases with the user base. Users will be more likely, I think, to take note of such ads, so those wanting them will pay more (a premium over web-equivalent). It probably won’t provide classifieds, but it can do serious stories in a very light format.

No, it’s not a slam-dunk, but I think the business model could be built and continue.