The Future of Journalism: Newspaper Die-off and the Opportunities of the Crisis

• Posted by Bernhard Debatin on 02/26/2009
• tags: etc, htc, online

Note: This is a condensed draft for a longer article on the future of journalism. It grew out of discussion at our school, particularly the Friday Colloquium. Critique and suggestions are welcome.

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We all know that the newspaper industry is not doing too well. Employment figures and advertising revenues don’t look too encouraging. Newspapers are dying or, like the Christian Science Monitor, migrating onto the Web. But the widespread doom-and-gloom reaction might not be the only way to understand this process.

Let’s take a look at some numbers.

According to the ASNE (American Society of Newspaper Editors) Newsroom Employment Census, the year 2008 is the first time since 1985 that the total number of newspaper employees has fallen under 53,000 (see Table A). And we have not yet seen the impact of the current economic crisis on that number.

Table C of the same study shows that the vast majority of job losses from 2007 to 2008 (both in percent and absolute numbers) happened in the category reporters (-1,489 = 6.1% of the 2007 reporters), followed by copy-/layout-editors (-495 = 4.4% of the 2007 copy-editors), then photographers (-192 = 3.3% of the ’07 photographers) and finally supervisors (-271 = 1.9% of the ’07 supervisors).

The total number of lost jobs from ’07 to ’08 was 2,447 (which is 4.45% of the ’07 total). And note that the overall number of jobs in the US (the so-called civilian labor force) hardly changed from 2007 to 2008.

So, this is not looking too good.

The pie is getting smaller. Particularly larger newspapers are in trouble and some of them have gone under. The watchblog Newspaper Death Watch notes that since March 2007, the following US metropolitan dailies have died:

Baltimore Examiner, Kentucky Post, Cincinnati Post, King County Journal, Union City Register-Tribune, Capital Times, Halifax Daily News, Albuquerque Tribune, South Idaho Press, San Juan Star...

Other newspaper decline watchblogs, such as Reflections of a Newsosaur, Media Shift, and The Demise of Print make similar observations.

This is mirrored in the ad market: According to the Newspaper Association of America, advertising revenues of newspapers have declined dramatically by "18.1 percent (third quarter 2008), 15.1 percent (second quarter 2008) and 12.8 percent (first quarter 2008)" (quoted in NNA).

However, as my colleague Bill Reader pointed out in an e-mail to me, this is mostly true for the bigger newspapers, not for local and community newspapers. Indeed, the National Newspaper Association (NNA) reports that

community newspapers are not experiencing the massive ad revenue declines that are being felt by some others in the industry nor are they experiencing massive layoffs.

Data collected in 2008 showed a 1.7 percent decline in advertising for the third quarter, 2.4 percent in the second quarter and 2.7 percent in the first quarter (all were measured against the same reporting period from the prior year).

This is good news.

Or at least not as bad as the news about the larger papers. Small town and community newspapers are less affected by the die-off than the big ones. This is, in part, related to the fact that local news is just not as easily available on the Internet as national and international news. But it might also be a delayed-reaction issue. We don’t know if the trend is just taking longer to trickle down onto the local level. It is also noteworthy that the long-term trend of ad revenues (1990 - 2007) for local papers does not look any better than that of national news (see Newspaper Next 2.0: Making the Leap Beyond ’Newspaper Companies’, p. 95, Figure 2).

It seems likely that the increasing migration of local newspapers to the Internet will ultimately lead to similar cuts in revenues and employment, and a higher dependence on citizen and lay journalists who contribute to their local newspaper via blog-based RSS-feed and other such technology.

Perhaps we’re employing the wrong metaphors.

Maybe this is not the big die-off. Do caterpillars die? Obviously, we don’t know whether we are going to see moths or butterflies, nor do we know how long they will live. But looking at the decline of the newspaper business as a transition, rather than as an extinction, might open up new perspectives. The transformation of the media will necessitate a transformation of the self-concept and the profile of journalism. The transformation is also an opportunity to ask questions about the future role of newspapers and advertisers, and about alternative models for financing the news business.

Future journalists should make sure they are well prepared for a multi- and crossmedia production that will revolve around the online world. They will also need to be prepared to make a difference in an environment that has very low publication thresholds, so that anybody with access to the Internet can publish. The difference lies in the combination of

• - the usefulness of the information -- which implies knowing the needs of the audience as citizens and members of different communities
• - the competence of the journalist -- as their ability to translate complex issues into understandable common language
• - the ability to create meaningful contexts -- transforming mere facts into rich and appropriately weighted information
• - the ethical orientation of the journalist -- a necessary condition for truthful, reliable, accurate, transparent and critical reporting

The information flood has made filtering more important than ever before, but journalists no longer exclusively hold the gatekeeping privilege. Today’s journalists must also be gatewatchers, interpreters, and sense-makers. They need to assume the role of meta-filters to help us through the jungle of information that is partly raw and fragmented, partly pre-filtered, and partly overly-complex.

Journalists will also increasingly be expected to listen to their audiences and learn from them, while offering them venues of communication. Journalists will be expected to guide and educate citizens about how to use the advanced networked media of mass communication as both critical consumers and potential producers.

Journalism schools of the future will need to put a stronger emphasis on educating all-around journalists who are able to assume the roles outlined above. We need to educate journalists who are generalists and who, at the same time, are able to communicate across the many different expert and lay cultures. This means that the profile of the journalistic profession will actually be more demanding than in the past. It is no longer sufficient to produce good "worker bee" journalists. Sure, there will be the McDonald’s jobs, flipping info-burgers -- shoveling existing content from one medium to another -- but highly skilled, competent, critical and versatile journalists who engage with their audience will become increasingly important. Or, as Dan Gilmore said in Journalism Education’s Broader, Deeper Mission for the PBS Media Shift Idea Lab:

Journalism educators should be in the vanguard of an absolutely essential shift for society at large: helping our students, and people in our larger communities, to navigate and manage the myriad information streams of a media-saturated world.

We need to help them understand why they need to become activists as consumers -- by taking more responsibility for the quality of what they consume, in large part by becoming more critical thinkers. And they need to understand their emerging role as creators of media.

What is going to happen to newspapers?

First of all, newspapers will need to develop strategies of how they can derive synergistic energies from a smart combination of online and print. They need to try to "become a new kind of local information and connection utility" because "this is a time of huge opportunity in local markets -- a time when the new local audiences and business models of the 21st century are being formed or soon will be," as the American Press Institute’s Newspaper Next 2.0 Transformation Report Making the Leap Beyond ’Newspaper Companies’ states (p. 5).

Second, a lot in the newspaper market will depend on if and how new business models will emerge that use the Internet as their main source of revenue. In fact, it all depends on how much companies will be able to maximize their online revenue:

The good news: Local online advertising spending will skyrocket in the next five years. The bad news: Traditional media will be hit hard. To capture their share of the explosive growth, newspaper companies must push aggressively into new sales structures and ad technologies and new online solutions for key verticals.

(Newspaper Next 2.0: Making the Leap Beyond ’Newspaper Companies’, p. 92)

It would seem that the move of news media toward the Web will pull advertisers toward that medium, too. The problem is, however, that on the Internet, the Emperor has no clothes: The advertising industry (in concert with the conventional media) used to apply the cluster bomb principle -- the more and the broader, the better -- without knowing much about the audience’s reaction to this constant stream of ads. This pretend attitude can no longer be maintained in an environment that allows for precise, user-specific behavior monitoring.

The advertisers’ lack of enthusiasm toward Internet advertising is not based on the assumption that the Internet is a suboptimal environment for ads; it is a reflection of the fact that the Internet is too good and too precise. It forces us to recognize what we always knew but were able to ignore in the cruder print and broadcast environment: that people pay little to no attention to ads and that ads hardly ever cause a specific behavior.

The question is, therefore: Will advertisers and their customers knowingly accept that Internet ads are as ineffective as any other type of ads and still pay for them, or will they insist on a result-oriented model that combines the ad with click-through rates and buying decisions? It seems that some German flagship media like SpiegelOnline and Bild have been able to convince their advertisers that the old cluster bomb model is sufficient for the Internet, too. But at the same time, German newspapers are undergoing the same decline as American ones. In analogy to the Waldsterben, people now talk about the Zeitungssterben.

Of course, there is a third solution; micro-targeted and localized advertising, an ideal model for highly interactive media such as the Internet. But this, again, requires a fair amount of strategic planning and a consequent reorientation and reorganization of what used to be called "newspaper."

Alternative support models

Alternatively, public support models could be considered. The French model of direct governmental support (as initiated by President Sarkozy in his Etats généraux de la presse) raises obvious questions of the independence and freedom of such a press.

Foundation-based models, such as the Poynter Institute (St. Petersburg Times), the Scott Trust (Guardian), or ProPublica guarantee excellent and independent journalism but they are singularities and can’t be generalized.

A third model would be the idea of a controlled subsidies model governed by public law, similar to the British or German public broadcast model. Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger stated that "local papers are vital - and must be saved." He proposed a tax-like fee that would be used for a publicly (not governmentally) controlled fund to support independent quality journalism, including newspapers.

These may not be panacea solutions, but they should be considered as the air in the news business is getting thinner.

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