Grasping at golden straws

Yes­ter­day Bar­bara and I attended a panel dis­cus­sion at the Ker­ry­town Book­Fest called “The Future of Print Jour­nal­ism”. I’ll leave the details to oth­ers; what I found of par­tic­u­lar inter­est was the thrust of the dis­cus­sion among the pan­elists, who were all edi­tors of one sort or another who’ve sur­vived in tran­si­tion from being old-​​fashioned newspaperfolk.

On the face of it, the nar­ra­tive was about the future of print jour­nal­ism in a world where the busi­ness model has been under­mined by free online con­tent. There was talk of aggre­ga­tion by Yahoo! (and Google, though nobody men­tioned them by name once) and how it under­mines the author­ity of news­pa­pers. There was a stern com­ment from the audi­ence about how blog­gers steal­ing con­tent from papers with­out cit­ing it should be sued. There was a lot of realistic-​​sounding explo­ration of pay­wall pro­tec­tion of con­tent and the appar­ent fail­ure of news­pa­pers to fathom micro­pay­ment approaches. A lot of dis­cus­sion of “free mod­els”, and what came across as antag­o­nism from the folks still at the big plop-​​on-​​your-​​steps papers at the notion of free content.

I started being bemused half-​​way through, though. Because four of the five pan­elists explic­itly described the eco­nom­ics of their busi­ness, talked about it wor­riedly, and then wan­dered away again into how cru­cial good writ­ing is, and how expen­sive pro­fes­sional jour­nal­ism can be, and all the other stuff that jus­ti­fies their spe­cial cre­den­tialled sociopo­lit­i­cal role in whichever Estate they used to be.

I’m sure the fifth pan­elist would have acknowl­edged the busi­ness facts in an instant… if it only been brought up explic­itly: Mod­ern news­pa­pers don’t sell jour­nal­ism. They sell adver­tis­ing. Dur­ing the 20th Cen­tury, news­pa­per rev­enue has come pri­mar­ily from advertisers.

And from about 1900 to about a decade ago, news­pa­pers sold print adver­tis­ing at monop­o­lis­tic prices. They were essen­tially a car­tel. Ads in books never took off; ads in mag­a­zines reached only widely-​​distributed sub­scriber demo­graph­ics. Only the local news­pa­per reached the walk-​​in traf­fic that retail­ers sought; coupons really don’t work well in tele­phone cam­paigns; TV is ephemeral, leaves no record.

Yet nobody says of the Inter­net, “Those unqual­i­fied online adver­tis­ers are under­min­ing our professionally-​​trained crack adver­tis­ing team,” or “Do you real­ize what it costs to pick an ad to run next to an arti­cle on a for­eign war?” or “Pho­tographs of ham can’t just be down­loaded from some web­site you know; you need pro­fes­sion­als on staff 24–7 to get the qual­ity our cus­tomers deserve.”

No, the dis­cus­sion was about “the econ­omy being bad” and “read­ers out there expect con­tent to be free” and blog­gers and cus­tomer bases and the threats and uses of aggregation.

I’m sure if there had been time to drive the con­ver­sa­tion my way, some­body would have jumped in and said, “Yes, of course we know print adver­tis­ing pays the bills, but nobody would buy the adver­tis­ing and get the bills paid if it weren’t for the high-​​quality report­ing we gen­er­ate using all that rev­enue.

But: Maybe peo­ple are still buy­ing adver­tis­ing. Just not from you.

Here. We’re friends. I’m just as pre­dictable as any­body else: I’m going to talk about his­tory now.

Pick up an actual print news­pa­per from 1820, from 1840, from 1860, from 1880, from 1900, from 1920, from 1940, from 1960. From 1980. Count the ads. Think care­fully and look at the books (if you have access to them) and esti­mate the pro­por­tion of the income of each news­pa­per that came from adver­tis­ing rev­enue. Yes, I know in the early days they were small, local affairs with maybe a thou­sand sub­scribers each.

But they got their bills paid. What pro­por­tion of those bills were paid by monies com­ing from the sale of print ads?

I’ll bet you a Get Out of Dis­in­ter­me­di­a­tion Free Pass right now that the ear­lier papers had almost no adver­tis­ing (includ­ing the money from arti­cles some­body was paid off to print), that the pro­por­tion bloomed into a major­ity in the days of Hearst and Pulitzer and the Great Syn­di­ca­tors, that it became a cash crop pay­ing 80% or more of the bills in the latter-​​day cull that killed all sec­ond papers in cities.

Print adver­tis­ing was a monop­oly. Still is, one supposes.

You can’t buy ubiq­ui­tous home-​​delivered print adver­tis­ing any­where else. Sure, you can pay sub-​​minimum wage peo­ple to wan­der neigh­bor­hoods and rubber-​​band fly­ers to front doors, or wait a few days and send out coupons in the Clip­per thingie.

And yet. And yet. Every­body knows (and for once I mean it uniron­i­cally) we all love the vis­ceral qual­ity of print, the solid­ity, the abil­ity to page back and check, the clip­ping, the pass­ing it around, the cross­words, the comics. The biggest fuss when a news­pa­per shuts down comes not from the adver­tis­ers (who are already gone by then), but from the sub­scribers. The peo­ple with the blue paper­boxes lin­ing the coun­try roads. The ones will­ing to trudge out to the road­side in win­ter, before break­fast, and take in the paper and sit and read it in their homes.

Phys­i­cal paper. Peo­ple love print. Peo­ple live print. If they get sad enough at the dimin­ish­ment of print jour­nal­ism, do you think they will let it die?

Don’t be a fool. They’ll pay some­body good money to pass it out to them.

Are peo­ple buy­ing ads? Shut your stu­pid mar­ket­ing department’s yam­mer­ing up and look. Peo­ple don’t want ads, they want printed infor­ma­tion. Even the peo­ple who clip coupons would be just as happy to pay you if you just listed the prices of every item at every store in town. They don’t want the coupon, they want the infor­ma­tion about pricing.

And so what’s the future of print journalism?

In many cities in this coun­try, the one news­pa­per is fac­ing finan­cial cri­sis. In smaller towns and wannabe cities (like ours), “the one news­pa­per” is dying. Yes of course in all those places there is prob­a­bly also a super­local paper about high school lunches and church meet­ings, and an edgy coun­ter­cul­ture free monthly, and a free coupon col­lec­tor, and a free real estate list­ing in the super­mar­ket foyer.…

Like I said, The One News­pa­per is dying.

You might think this is what it will be like: Like 1882. Or 1860 or 1900 or 1930, even. The Empire of news is dying, not news itself. Not jour­nal­ism itself.

The adver­tis­ing monop­oly is dying. The eco­log­i­cal niche occu­pied by The One Paper is a goner, not papers them­selves. Specif­i­cally, the One Paper’s national-​​scale ad rev­enues are a goner.

Printed news­pa­pers will have to start rely­ing, again, on the rev­enue streams they enjoyed in the 19th century.

And because it’s how I always do it, let me jink sud­denly from his­tor­i­cal anal­ogy over into bio­log­i­cal metaphor:

Big ani­mals get big not because they are spe­cial­ists in what they eat, but to take advan­tage of economies of scale in their eat­ing. The biggest cats are oblig­ate hunter-​​carnivores just like some shrews, but have very spe­cial char­ac­ter­is­tics of gigan­tism and com­plex lifestyles to keep from wan­der­ing around all day burn­ing calo­ries hunt­ing. Big whales eat very spe­cial meals (giant squid, krill), like many other marine species do, but are huge so they can avoid flash­ing around in big schools all over the place. Big dinosaurs prob­a­bly got big so they could reach or man­han­dle their very spe­cial meals, but lit­tler species could as eas­ily have climbed trees or ganged up. And mar­su­pial lions and wolves? Giant car­niv­o­rous birds, or moas? Giant sloths and mam­moths? Spe­cial­ists, but big because of economies of scale in their diets.

In the big picture—in the course of evo­lu­tion­ary history—megafauna come and go. As a type, fol­low­ing a par­tic­u­lar spe­cial­ized strat­egy that depends on being gigan­tic, they’re often dri­ven to extremes by the pres­ence of a small fruit­ful slice of resources in their envi­ron­ment. Unlike their smaller cousins, they go out on a limb and opti­mize their energy use and lifestyles so they can spend as lit­tle as pos­si­ble to get as much food as pos­si­ble as eas­ily as possible.

But even­tu­ally the limb is gone.

And there you are, you big pile of yummy meat. Sur­rounded by other kinds of spe­cial­ists, who didn’t invest in becom­ing huge.

The future of print jour­nal­ism is a feast, not a famine. The One City News­pa­per, the national news­pa­per, the Inher­ited News­pa­per Empire: that is the main course.

A decade ago I would have pre­dicted we’d see the indus­try roll back all that expen­sive infra­struc­ture the One City News­pa­pers have devel­oped, in set­ting them­selves up as megafau­nal ad-​​eaters, and we’d end up back in a sit­u­a­tion about like 1880. A dozen papers, each with a slice of the sub­scriber pie, with a lit­tle adver­tis­ing rev­enue each to keep them afloat.

Now I’m older and not so sure. Now I see a lovely chaos, a bloom of strate­gies, a roil of use­ful col­lab­o­ra­tion and competition.

What I won­der though, is what was never asked yes­ter­day: who will be the first to fire the mar­ket­ing depart­ment and keep the writ­ers and edi­tors?

That’s the next wave. That’s the imme­di­ate future of print journalism.

7 thoughts on “Grasping at golden straws

  1. I’m inclined to use the word greed to describe some fac­tors of the down­fall of One City News­pa­pers. I guess you could call the big organ­ism strat­egy you describe greed, but I don’t sense mal­ice from the big organ­isms in the bio­log­i­cal strat­egy anal­ogy. I think humans are greedy, mali­cious bug­gers who don’t just want enough to exist and pro­cre­ate in peace. I think a good num­ber of them want more than enough just to have more or the most. e.g. SPARK’s insis­tence that growth for growth’s sake is the only way to do business.

  2. I fear that the dis­cus­sion about eco­nom­ics clouded a lot of what I had hoped would be the gist of the dis­cus­sion: I truly believe there’s noth­ing wrong with the state of jour­nal­ism today, it’s the busi­ness side that’s all messed up. And yet the edi­tors and busi­ness lead­ers at a lot of papers keep try­ing to fix the prob­lem by fig­ur­ing out the “new” direc­tion of con­tent. There isn’t a new direc­tion — peo­ple still want to read the news, and they want it from a cred­i­ble source. A non-​​profit model might work really well for local news orga­ni­za­tions, because it would take the pres­sure off hav­ing con­stant profits.

    This line of your col­umn sums up what I have been think­ing: “What I won­der though, is what was never asked yes­ter­day: who will be the first to fire the mar­ket­ing depart­ment and keep the writ­ers and editors?”

  3. Laura,

    No. Can’t be. I demand to dif­fer on this one: Cor­po­ra­tions can­not be greedy. They aren’t people—they aren’t even remotely like people—no mat­ter what “rights” they claim, and the mythol­ogy we have built up about them.

    Man­agers may well be greedy, though. Own­ers, land­lords, bankers. Long time back, it was even millers. Those can be greedy, but they’re people.

    If we’re com­fort­able with the anal­ogy of big news­pa­per ≈ big organ­ism, then we have to be care­ful with moti­va­tion, is all I’m say­ing. A big organ­ism may not be “greedy”, but it has con­trol­ling inter­ests that want. Dri­ves towards food, ter­ri­tory, sex. Parts of it are “greedy”, sometimes.

    That gets stuff done.

    Yes, greed may be the moti­va­tion of the own­ers, the con­sol­ida­tors. Nobody ever accused Mis­ter Hearst of altru­ism, back in the day. But if you look at it, all of it, it only costs so much (as Tony Dear­ing even said yes­ter­day, in pass­ing) because they feel you need to be that big to make that much money.

    Being a big monop­oly is a strat­egy to make money. Maybe (and almost cer­tainly) it’s not ratio­nal, but it is rea­son­able.

    Why you need that much money, well, that’s maybe some person’s greed. Or maybe it’s some person’s devo­tion to the Pub­lic Good. Or maybe it’s some person’s quirky sense of artfulness.

  4. Sharon,

    And yet the edi­tors and busi­ness lead­ers at a lot of papers keep try­ing to fix the prob­lem by fig­ur­ing out the “new” direc­tion of con­tent. There isn’t a new direc­tion — peo­ple still want to read the news, and they want it from a cred­i­ble source.

    It’s more com­pli­cated than that. I agree that the old cus­tomer base wants the news, as it was. But I don’t read the paper the same way they do; I read a half-​​thousand RSS feeds, some daily, some weekly, some when I can. They’re cre­ated by peo­ple and sources I’ve per­son­ally vet­ted, and they in turn send me to other things they feel I ought to see.

    And I’m not weird, just early. Wein­berger and Shirky are right about people’s needs as much as you are. Just dif­fer­ent people.

    In the short term—and prob­a­bly for a long time—somebody could make a mod­est liv­ing sell­ing printed news­pa­pers (with very few ads) to folks who used to sub­scribe to “real” local newspapers.

    In the long term, though, that would be a buggy whip maker’s move. A dozen papers, a hun­dred news feeds, a thou­sand or more web­sites I read in a week. All because there are a hun­dred splin­tered, over­lap­ping, spe­cial­ized and active com­mu­ni­ties I belong to.

    Each has its own resources and needs and demands, and each would pay for some­thing different.

    The threat to the big papers’ edi­to­r­ial model comes from peo­ple like me, like “kids these days”. We are our­selves some­thing closer to edi­tors than consumers.

  5. I’m inclined to agree with you, Bill, though I do think the unre­al­is­tic demand from investors for 20% plus mar­gins pushed more news­pa­pers into cri­sis than nec­es­sar­ily had to be the case. But even sane mar­gins would only have delayed the inevitable.

    I can’t speak to what was dis­cussed in the panel because I wasn’t there. But I have noted, in other dis­cus­sions, a con­sis­tent ten­dency among defend­ers of tra­di­tional jour­nal­ism to ignore the fac­tor of time.

    Even if print jour­nal­ism has the edge on qual­ity over online jour­nal­ism (and I’m no longer con­vinced it does), it cer­tainly isn’t likely to ten years from now. Even if qual­ity jour­nal­ism is expen­sive today, there’s no rea­son to think bet­ter, less expen­sive means to sup­port jour­nal­ism won’t arise in com­ing years (espe­cially when we are already see­ing signs of them today).

    More to the point: there is no need to insist that ‘qual­ity jour­nal­ism’ be defined by the stan­dards of the past. As new tech­nol­ogy affords new pos­si­bil­i­ties, our def­i­n­i­tions can and will change to acknowl­edge and embrace them.

  6. Bill,

    I worked for Ford and Chrysler in the late 70’s — early 80’s, and it is quite strik­ing how sim­i­lar the atti­tudes of many in jour­nal­ism are to the atti­tudes I saw at the Big 3.

    The 70’s saw the first big wave of con­sumer defec­tion from the Big 3 to Japan­ese imports. At the Big 3, the level of denial of what was hap­pen­ing, and the com­plete inabil­ity to con­ceive of any way of doing busi­ness other than the way they had been, was almost uni­ver­sal. Beyond that, the anger of the man­agers and employ­ees of the Big 3 at con­sumers for aban­don­ing them, the sense that they were enti­tled to the con­sumers’ patron­age, is, in ret­ro­spect, quite astonishing.

    I see the same sense of enti­tle­ment, the same inabil­ity to con­ceive of any other way to do busi­ness, in jour­nal­ism. There are, of course, jour­nal­ists who under­stand that things can never be the way they were, but their num­bers seem quite few.

    It took the Big 3 years to come to grips with the fact that they needed to make fun­da­men­tal changes to the way they did busi­ness. It took many more years to imple­ment those changes, and they are still not done. It is most likely too late for Chrysler, and may be too late for GM as well. In the mean­time, tens of thou­sands of peo­ple have lost their jobs.

    I won­der how long it will take jour­nal­ism to fig­ure out that things will never be the same.

  7. A lot of the early big-​​city papers were mostly adver­tis­ing and trad­ing news – one sheet of paper folded in half, with the out­side wrap­per being ads, and one page of the inside a list of ship man­i­fests, pric­ing, etc. It’s only fairly recently that news­pa­pers became what we think of today.

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