As the world kept him thinking in turns so would the blank, empty, undiluted space in the upper right corner of his unimaginative American blog. It left itself for last - as if it knew it was much too smart for him - as if the search bar that had once been there was an overture to another space in time - as if that corner meant more than it really did.
Why Newspapers Must Die
How to Save Your Newspaper – Walter Isaacson’s cover story from the 2/16/09 edition of Time Magazine has gotten a lot of traction over the last few days – so I won’t bore you with details about it. However, I will take the time to point out exactly where in the article I think Isaacson goes off the rails – his title.
Simply put, newspapers cannot be saved. They are big bloated, convoluted corporate anachronisms that derive their strength and power from an economic model of news information that is in rapid and steep decline. These corporate entities were built and grew powerful in an age when new information was remote, precious, scarce, capital.
That age is over.
Today fresh information is immediate, cheap, abundant, available. News happens and is distributed in real time – worldwide – before lumbering outfits like the New York Times even have a chance to think up a catchy headline.
Certainly folks like Mr. Isaacson like to spin the yarn that their information is the quality information, premium information – and that may even have a grain of truth to it. Still, news is the at the cheapest end of the information spectrum – it’s real value is it’s immediacy – the speed with which it gets to market. Quality – aside from accuracy – is not and never really has been a dominant factor in determining the value of news. Analysis, commentary, insight, have always been more comfortable in the studied format of the magazine or the give and take of radio and television.
The sad fact of the matter is that no combination of revenue – subscription, advertising, micropayment – will ever be enough to sustain the traditional news model. It’s going, going, gone. As Susan Mernit writes in a post on the same topic:
…the legacy systems, the ad margins, the physical plants, the leveraged debt–newspaper companies have tons of baggage, that, combined with shifts over the past 5 years in consumer behavior, are that mill stone around their necks, the 300-lb albatross dragging the shop down.
That shift in consumer behavior she’s talking about there is the real death knell. Even if newspapers can trim their operations to get rid of that albatross they will still be facing a serious problem – the demand for information (news specifically) as a product will never be significant enough to sustain a business. The energy that drove demand for new information is slowly but surely being siphoned into a new energy that drives the supply of new information – readers are transforming into producers. I outlined this in more detail in a recent post here on this blog. Here’s a bit from that:
In a networked world we are connected in real time – events unfold and are witnessed and what was once a journalistic source is now a raw feed. The traditional role of the journalist – to weave these sources, these raw feeds into a coherent story – is quickly becoming an individual civic responsibility.
Once we accept this fact and realize that we have all along been conflating the welfare of journalism with the welfare of the corporate entities that have traditionally sponsored that work we can begin down the long hard road to the next news model.
In that spirit – and to serve as a bookend to the link at the top of this post – I embed for your viewing pleasure the recent keynote delivered by Douglas Rushkoff to last November’s Ofcom Conference in the UK. Rushkoff’s lecture – as well as his upcoming book Life Incorporated – deals with the issue and history of corporatism. His speech in this video fueled a lot of my thinking in this post and opened my eyes to the ways in which corporate (mass) media entities have profited from the corporatist model and how emerging technologies are contributing to that model’s demise.
As emerging technologies and abundant information transform our world we need to be ready to accept the collapse of institutions we once mistook as eternal. Only in doing so will we be able to capitalize on the transformative push of technology. Only after we stop talking about saving newspapers and start talking about a new journalism that organically takes advantage of next generation news gathering and distribution technologies will we begin to see genuine solutions develop.
Thanks for saying this. It's so much like 2000 with the music industry, they would keep explaining why it was so important for everyone else that they keep making money, meantime they were using up what little time they had to navigate some really complicated situations with an emotional appeal that was falling on deaf ears. Now, nine years later, they seem to have finally given up and are accepting reality the way they should have in 2000.
News is, unfortunately MUCH more central to the way our society functions than music is and we're deeply in the the transition now, and the news orgs aren't covering the transition directly or objectively. It's now getting time for whatever replaces it to start functioning. There's not any time left for trying to figure out how to save them. THat's off-topic. They should give it up too the way the music industry should have given it up in 2000. And the way my own industry, shrinkwrap commercial software did, in the early-mid 90s.
If you ever want to pinpoint the moment when the software industry realized it was over, it was when Netscape did the fantastically rich IPO with almost no revenue. That was the moment, imho.
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1. How do you come to the conclusion that quality and accuracy can be separate?
“Quality – aside from accuracy – is not and never really has been a dominant factor in determining the value of news.”
2. As your numerous grammatical errors prove, (“it's” = “it is”, not possession) “quality” does not only encompass accuracy, it also encompasses skills, training, and credibility- a value that newspapers (not all) have earned over time, and cannot be easily replaced with “a new journalism that organically takes advantage of next generation news gathering and distribution technologies”.
I newspapers are embracing a dying model, but the ones that are “saved” will be the ones that can adapt to the new immediacy of information decimation while applying their “quality” to it.
I'm afraid that the newspaper industry will decline gradually after going through a long period of consolidation. This is likely to lead to more and more bifurcation of our society between those who leverage the latest technology and are well-informed, high information news consumers and those who depend on low-tech legacy channels. The major fault line will be generational and could have dire consequences for the future of our democracy.
I Live in Michigan Detroit Papers have already joined Custer(:> MS
[...] Why Newspapers Must Die | [in plain sight]. [...]
Newspaper's are in a plot next to General Custer, he shall be remembered no one will know Newspaper's are missing.
[...] Why newspapers must dieToday fresh information is immediate, cheap, abundant, available. News happens and is distributed in real time – worldwide – before lumbering outfits like the New York Times even have a chance to think up a catchy headline. Great video from Douglas Rushkoff at the end of the article. Mass media emerged for marketing reasons (not vice versa). [...]
1. I don't come to that conclusion – I'm simply saying that of all the aspects of “quality” the only one that is relevant in determining the value of news is that it's accurate. I take as a primary example the work of Janis Krums on the Flight 1549 crash. The quality of the pic is quite poor – but that does not matter in the least. Its value is determined by it's accuracy and it's speed to market.
2. Pointing out grammatical errors in this medium – especially when the writer obviously knows the difference – is rather silly. In fact I would refer you to my explanation of #1 above for an example of how compositional imperfection really does not factor in determining credibility of a news source. If it did I'd have to disqualify your comment since you obviously lack a skilled command of the language: “I newspapers are embracing a dying model” (I kid of course).
Also – I don't think that getting to the new journalism will be easy at all – it will be a difficult, bloody, costly, and imperfect process. And my best guess tells me that it might very well involve a falling away of the corporate entities that currently oversee the news process – newspapers.
1. I don't come to that conclusion – I'm simply saying that of all the aspects of “quality” the only one that is relevant in determining the value of news is that it's accurate. I take as a primary example the work of Janis Krums on the Flight 1549 crash. The quality of the pic is quite poor – but that does not matter in the least. Its value is determined by it's accuracy and it's speed to market.
2. Pointing out grammatical errors in this medium – especially when the writer obviously knows the difference – is rather silly. In fact I would refer you to my explanation of #1 above for an example of how compositional imperfection really does not factor in determining credibility of a news source. If it did I'd have to disqualify your comment since you obviously lack a skilled command of the language: “I newspapers are embracing a dying model” (I kid of course).
Also – I don't think that getting to the new journalism will be easy at all – it will be a difficult, bloody, costly, and imperfect process. And my best guess tells me that it might very well involve a falling away of the corporate entities that currently oversee the news process – newspapers.
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