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.