The Never-ending Conversation: Oh What Will Come of the Newspapers?

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I pulled this out of Romanesko and sent it to Ricardo and Big Pat:


"There are only two ways to stop the newspaper death spiral"

Calbuzz
Phil Trounstine and Jerry Roberts write:
* Newspapers have to concentrate all of their force and fire power on their own communities, making themselves indispensable to local residents.
* Or, a business like Google or Yahoo can begin to pay reporters in communities to produce content -- to cover city councils and school boards, write about local development and utilities, local sports and arts, etc.
Posted at 10:15 AM Apr. 2, 2009


Ricardo responded:

Thanks for the link. I agree with the general drift of local focus and internet deals as promising tunnel end of light.

Somehow, against the odds, the swell of letters to the Chron editor on this topic, silly often though not always, and particularly those commenting on facets of a non-profit reorg approach (with well-compensated newspaper pros) gives me an odd hope.

I'd ignore those letters if they didn't fit so closely with reporting on Gavin Newsome and rich guys talking out loud about this same thing. So, put me down in the unlikely optimist column, regarding the Chron only, with little hope for big city papers elsewhere.

And then Big Pat said:

The problem I see with this is that “all force and power on their own communities” will likely shake out to, “all force and power to wealthy communities”. Who will cover the local ghetto, West Fuck, Shasta county, or Weed, California? Not that they do a good job today, but I don’t see a new model reaching the same high level of ignorance as what we have now. Small town papers, with exceptions, are in the pocket of their advertisers. They loathe to run local investigative pieces. They don’t have the expertise and they don’t want to pay for the expertise, they want to talk about the county fair.


And so then *I* said.

Yah, Pat is right – newspapers are owned by the pillars of the community and all flows from that. Indeed, the heretical question is what fraction of what is in a newspaper appeals to what fraction of those voters and activists who move events one way or another achieving some substantive change of how things change, politically or otherwise. We say newspapers matter, as I naturally would since my self-image and my reason for being is intimately connected with the notion that they do/did matter. (And I was a feature writer for god’s sake.)

Maybe what comes after will accomplish whatever good things newspapers have accomplished – but with less preening, less self-important huffing and puffing? It’s not a rhetorical question mark.

MoreMore More on Dying Newspapers

Here are comment made by John -- no last name; the mystery, the mystery -- over at Alan Mutter's Reflections of a Newsosauer. Is he right? Is emphasis on local news some sort of American oddity? Would word-of-mouth, plus "volunteer" blog-based news, actually work for cities like Oakland and San Francisco?

The US newspaper market has always bemused me in it size and structure. There is no other news market in the world with such a strong reliance on locally driven content. This creates a byzantine cost structure that ultimately harms the industry. That mid-sized cities cannot support more than one paper is barely a surprise. The question should be whether it can support a paper at all.

A shakeout that results in a ~4-6 national papers (perhaps with the odd local insert) will bequeath a stronger industry where the parent company can capture more synergies across the group. Not only that but the funds will remain in place for high quality investiagtive reporting that is essential for a well functioning democracy.

Oboglo Shot a Newspaper in Reno Just to Watch it Die. For its Own Good

Image via Wikipedia

From Kwame Oboglo:

on Boing Boing today. There's more there, but it's too techy to maintain my absorption.


When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of its most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away.

And here's the money-shot:

When someone demands to be told how we can 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

Huh. It's Always Darkest Before the Dawn?

'Off the Record' is a Cancer

From Kevin Drum:

"Off the record" has become a cancer. It's now practically a default presumption, rather than a rare exception granted for specific and justifiable reasons. Unfortunately, no one is willing to do anything about it. A few years ago the big newspapers all instituted policies that banned blind quotes unless there was a good case for them, but as near as I can tell the only result was to force their reporters to concoct ever more inventive ways of saying "because he wouldn't talk otherwise." Beyond that, life went on as usual.