Life After Newspapers

Your Local Print Edition?

Newspapers are an important part of our lives, not to read, of course, but, when you’re moving you can’t wrap your dishes in a blog. —Stephen Colbert

New media guru Clay Shirky shook the industry a couple of months ago with his thoughtful post on the future of dead-tree editions called Newspapers And Thinking The Unthinkable.

Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.

Two months after Shirky’s widely cited piece, Omaha’s leading citizen and alpha male of the financial world Warren Buffett was asked at the annual Berkshire Hathaway convention if he would consider investing in more newspapers. Buffett, who had every reason to dodge the question (he owns the Buffalo News and the Washington Post), instead answered with his usual forthrightness: “For most newspapers in the United states, we would not buy them at any price . . . . They have the possibility of going to just unending losses.”

Ours is not the only local paper committing seppuku before the eyes of its readers, but never has the disconnect between reading news online and reading the Omaha World-Herald been more pronounced. As pages, quality of content, and breadth of coverage all dwindle in both the print and online editions, we receive only sunny bulletins from the publisher about how the World-Herald’s market penetration is high (thanks to free subscriptions whenever market penetration is being measured) and how traffic to its website is also high (with no mention of its profitability).

The first pronouncement from above came last December 7th in a column entitled: “World-Herald Moves to Embrace Strong Future”. In it, the World-Herald’s publisher Terry Kroeger sang the paper’s praises and talked down his nose about mere bloggers and talk-radio hosts:

Bloggers, talk-radio hosts and TV pundits all can entertain and inform. But only the local newspaper has the staff, experience and expertise to gather facts on a wide range of topics and present them in an objective and understandable format.

Really? A day after Kroeger’s piece appeared, Jim Romenesko’s media watchdog site PoynterOnline (just another blogger?) posted commentary on Kroeger’s piece asking: Are Publishers So Overwhelmed They’re Unable To Write Original Columns? Apparently much of Kroeger’s column bore a striking resemblance to a column that had previously appeared in the Kansas City Star. Oops. Here at WeirdHarold.com, we were looking for an apology on the same pages where the “original” column had appeared. Hey, we all make mistakes. Admit the goof, and get on with it. But no explanation or apology appeared in the World-Herald. Apparently, whatever happened never happened.

The next state-of-the-industry update from the OWH publisher came in an op-ed piece entitled: Top News Source Is In Your Hands, published last March (It’s hard to uncover these columns because Omaha.com allows searches going back only seven days). In this column, Kroeger recited a laundry list of industry woes without any particulars about how the World-Herald was weathering the storm and instead insinuated that newspapers were being too hard on themselves:

Our industry tends to aggressively report on itself, particularly when there is bad news to share. This goes to the longstanding ethics of newspaper journalists who rightly insist that those who are the watchdogs must report on their own happenings as well as those we cover.

A breathtaking bit of Orwellian double-newspeak, because we get no coverage from the World-Herald about how the industry downturn is affecting its bottom line. Like many troubled newspapers the World-Herald does an abysmal job when it comes to reporting on its own woes. It buries news of its lay-offs and across-the-board salary reductions and doesn’t report at all about whether its own future is threatened. Even the New York Times is in trouble, but unlike the Omaha World-Herald, the Times at least acknowledges the problem and permits free-range discussion about its future from the likes of its media correspondent, David Carr (see, for example, If The Globe Were Sold, What Price? and The Times and the Future).

It’s unlikely we will ever read Mike Kelly or Robert Nelson discussing hard times at the World-Herald. Even if the paper allowed it, you’d have to buy a print copy, because these columnists are available only to subscribers of the print edition. Then if you really liked one of their columns and wanted to send it to somebody, you’d need a pair of scissors and a photocopy machine. How 1990. In fact, if you read Shirky’s excellent piece, the World-Herald is precisely where the Miami Herald was in 1993 when they tried to prevent Dave Barry’s fans from disseminating his columns online after they discovered that a kid in the Midwest was reprinting the columns via e-mail, because he liked Dave Barry so much that he wanted his friends to be able to read him. “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.”

Commentators on the state of the newspaper industry seem to fall into two camps: Those who say, in effect, “Hurry up and get it over with, so we can figure out what to do next.” You can find excellent coverage along these lines at Paul Gillin’s Newspaper Death Watch. On the other side are commentators like Frank Rich whose recent column in the Sunday Times The American Press on Suicide Watch seems to suggest that people will have to pay for quality journalism one way or another, or quality journalism will vanish. And then what?

By all means let’s mock the old mainstream media as they preen and party on in a Washington ballroom. Let’s deplore the tabloid journalism that, like the cockroach, will always be with us. But if a comprehensive array of real news is to be part of the picture as well, the time will soon arrive for us to put up or shut up. Whatever shape journalism ultimately takes in America, make no mistake that in the end we will get what we pay for.

But most commentators agree that “You’ll miss us when we’re gone” doesn’t make for much of a business model. Instead, many are openly saying that we should let newspapers die (Jack Shafer’s Democracy’s Cheat Sheet? It’s time to kill the idea that newspapers are essential for democracy at Slate). This should be especially true, I believe, for newspapers that are still trying to use their websites as giant ads or teasers for their print editions. As long as these news organizations believe that their print editions are the main thing and that the Internet is a sideshow, they are in a pathological state of denial with no hope of survival. Shirky said it best:

And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.

Maybe the World-Herald must continue to believe first and foremost in its print edition because it still has a $125 million printing press to pay for, courtesy of the former publisher and his renowned, intense hatred of the Internet. Maybe, but in that case, Shirky has some news for them:

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

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