We touched on the ‘old guard’ of newspaper crews today being reluctant to adapt to new information technology, not willing to forfeit their traditional roles as gatekeepers to praise the new opportunities of information gathering as a public space.
A journalism professor at the University of North Carolina, Philip Meyer, has studied the decline of American newspaper readership. His extrapolation of the data shows that, if newspapers do nothing to change their ways, they will lose their very last reader in 2044.
In line with this: ‘Time is running out’ perspective is an article published in the
New Yorker by Eric Alterman today. Ironically, if it had never been online, I would have never come across it at all. It’s an overview of the American Newspaper, a 300 year old institution, that may not survive the next century.
“Few believe that newspapers in their current printed form will survive. Newspaper companies are losing advertisers, readers, market value, and, in some cases, their sense of mission at a pace that would have been barely imaginable just four years ago.”
He’s all over the place from the 1920’s, to Walter Lippman’s and Arthur Miller’s views on journalism, to the virtues of mainstream journalism and funeral pyres of the Newsprint industry. It’s a tedious read. Obviously Mr. Alterman didn’t get the memo for concise paragraphs in online publishing. More interesting than his rambling, I thought was his citing of London’s Times executive editor, Bill Keller’s “Not Dead Yet” published in the Guardian.
Words of wisdom, from an old school guy, doing some progressive thinking for a new generation:
“For all of the woes besetting our business, I believe with all my heart that newspapers - whether they are distributed to your doorstep, your laptop, your iPhone or a chip implanted in your cerebral cortex - will be around for a long time.
Newspapers, including at least a few very good newspapers, will survive, simply put, because of that basic law of market economics: supply and demand. The supply of what we produce is sadly diminishing. And the demand has never been greater.
People crave trustworthy information about the world we live in. Some people want it because it is essential to the way they make a living. Some want it because they regard being well-informed as a condition of good citizenship. Some want it because they want something to exchange over dinner tables and water coolers. Some want it so they can get the jokes on the late-night TV shows. There is a demand, a market, for journalism.
That may sound like a strange thing to say in the age of 'too much Information'. You turn on your computer and there is a media tsunami: blogs, Google News, RSS feeds, social sites like MySpace and file-sharing programs like YouTube. You can harvest it from around the world. You can customize it. You can have it delivered to your cell phone.
The old joke that freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one is now largely inoperative. Freedom of the press now belongs to anyone with an Internet Service Provider. This is all unsettling to the traditional news business, but it is also an opportunity.
The truth is, people crave more than raw information. What they crave, and need, is independent judgment, someone they can trust to vouch for the information, dig behind it, and make sense of it. The more discerning readers want depth, they want scepticism, they want context, they want the material laid out in a way that honours their intelligence, they might even welcome a little wit and grace and style.
The newspaper companies that will offer these things 20 years from now will be different, even more different than today's newspapers are from the newspapers of 20 years ago. We are already changing before your eyes, morphing into hybrid newsrooms that produce journalism in print and on-line, and racing to invent enough revenue from our growing websites to compensate for the diminishing returns in print.”
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