What’s the Future of Newspapers?
By Alan Stewart Carl | Related entries in Business, Media, News
American newspapers have been losing revenue and cutting costs for years. Now, with the Tribune Co.’s bankruptcy filing, the long-term future of such newspapers as the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune are in question. As Doug noted yesterday, it’s not a good time to be the old media.
The Tribune Co. slashed its workforce earlier this year but is still a long a way from turning a profit as ad revenues continue to move away from newspapers and into online media. As of yet, newspapers have not found a way to leverage their online presence to compensate for the ad dollars being lost in their print editions. You simply can’t charge as much for a banner ad as you can for an eight-page circular.
So, do newspapers have a future? I’m not overly optimistic. In an interactive, on-demand world, newspapers are static and they become out-of-date minutes after they roll off the presses. This doesn’t mean they are useless, simply that they are fighting against the transformation of communication. The telegraph didn’t survive the invention of the phone and radio plays didn’t survive the invention of television. It’s not looking good for print journalism to survive the current transformational period.
The concern, of course, is whether the death of the newspaper will harm journalism in general. How will we get reliable news without local reporters with in-depth knowledge and a level of journalistic ethics not commonly seen in on-line forums? Will a few trained, experienced newspaper men and women be replaced by a legion of opinionated half-wits with personal blogs and axes to grind?
I imagine your level of concern with that scenario directly relates to how you feel about the current state of print journalism. If you believe the centralization and filtering of information is essential for a knowledgeable and well-rounded populace, you’re going to be worried. If, on the other hand, you believe there is substantial bias and ignorance in the current print media, you’re probably less concerned by the prospect of losing a few uppity journalism “professionals.â€
I remain hopeful that the loss of newspapers will not mean the loss of journalistic resources but that those resources will just relocate to the Internet. I imagine we’re still many years away from the final death of newspapers but the Tribune Co.’s bankruptcy reminds us that the industry is in a bad situation and it’s not getting better. Like it or not, we’re entering a new age of journalism.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 9th, 2008 and is filed under Business, Media, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
December 9th, 2008 at 9:36 am
Having been a student of the Missouri Method, I believe there absolutely is no substitute for solid journalism principles and practices. Because of that, there will always be a gold standard somewhere out there in medialand. Eventually it could be online (or maybe it already does), because you’re right, it probably won’t live in newspaper pages much longer, if it even does anymore anyway. It may seem like nitwits both consume and produce the “news” nowadays, but when something really important or life-shattering happens, the gold standard outshines them all every time. There’s just no replacing that.
As for print journalism, I think there will be an even stronger shift toward niche publications (magazines) where solid reporting is still appreciated, required and well read, and there may be a reawakening of long-form writing to counterbalance the snippets we digest elsewhere. Newspapers that remain in circulation will undoubtedly undergo major facelifts, such as scaling back to only one section, portable tabloid sizes, weekly formats, moving to six days (removing saturday), all of which is to cut costs and compete in our 3-second sound bite society.