Are Newspapers Dead?

Submitted by drslice on December 10, 2008 - 1:53am

THE ISSUE

The Tribune company has filed for bankruptcy. The New York Times has announced that it plans to borrow as much as $225 million against its newly opened building. Advertising revenues are down 15% this year. Readers are flocking to the web, and the newspaper companies have not been able to adjust quickly enough. Bloggers and citizen journalists now deliver the news to people before the mainstream media can piece together a report.

All this seems to point to a decline and eventual death of the newspaper industry. Are newspapers a thing of the past?

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Arguments For

Argument from 2005

By edb - Dec 11, 2008

BusinessWeek said this back in 2005:

Newspapers are cockroaches. No matter what is introduced into the media ecosystem, the oldest of the Big Media survives. Despite decades of doomsayers, newspapers prospered through radio, through TV and cable, through video games, through the Internet....

Not so fast. Suddenly, even sober Wall Street analysts think something new is afoot.

What looms now "is different from all other threats," says Lauren Rich Fine (no relation), a Merrill Lynch & Co. (MER ) analyst who has covered the industry since the 1980s. Consumers are shifting decisively to online information, says Fine, especially the young, and are no longer yoked to the local newspaper. "Ads are following the eyeballs to where they make transactional decisions." Fine recently forecast that newspapers' profit margins are set to enter a long period of decline.

The new and troubling reality for newspapers is that even if they excel as purveyors of information to appreciative audiences, they still face tough business terrain. "They can try to be the destination where you go online and [can] be really successful with citizen journalism and blogs," says Fine. But such innovations are "not going to pay a lot of bills."

Related link: Net To Newspapers: Drop Dead

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Dave Winer's Suggestions

By mrissues - Dec 10, 2008

First, reform journalism school. It's too late to be training new journalists in the classic mode. Instead, journalism should become a required course, one or two semesters for every graduate. Why? Because journalism like everything else that used to be centralized is in the process of being distributed. In the future, every educated person will be a journalist, as today we are all travel agents and stock brokers. The reporters have been acting as middlemen, connecting sources with readers, who in many cases are sources themselves. As with all middlemen, something is lost in translation, an inefficiency is added. So what we're doing now, in journalism, as with all other intermediated professions, is decentralizing. So it pays to make an investment now and teach the educated people of the future the basic principles of journalism.

Second, embrace the best bloggers. How? Easy -- every time someone is quoted in your publication, offer them a blog hosted on your domain. This has a couple of advantages: 1. It gives the reporters the ultimate say on who gets to share some of your authority, who gets a chance to be the next amateur star. 2. It gives the reporters an incentive to only use sources that are qualified, it would improve the quality of your reporting. It also has a third benefit, as you expand the number of people writing under your banner, you also expand the reach of your publication, into school boards, local government, sports teams and businesses. It's also important because it's how you decentralize, aligning your interests with the "grain" of the web, as opposed to the current positioning, against it.

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Print Media is Dying

By NotJon - Dec 10, 2008

Most newspapers are either very liberal or very conservative. Readers are growing weary of this. They want unbiased news reporting, not slant. By the way, network television news; better learn quickly from print media on this one before its too late for you too!
With the exception of the bi-fold newspapers, the “technology” and packaging has not changed in decades. Please name me one other “product” that has not evolved in what seems like forever.
Print media blames the Internet and cable news channels for their loss of business. To some point, there is truth in that, as the immediacy of the ‘net and cable is hard to challenge, unless, you actually provide your readers in-depth facts and knowledge that they cannot readily find elsewhere. Keep in mind that the Internet and cable news channels are also usually slanted, and only give superficial attention to the stories that they report on.
Today’s reporting is like politics, all about the “gotcha.” That’s not what readers want, but how many newspapers do you know that actively interact with their readers in a way that provides them with the needed feedback to better service their readers? As someone who has run a market research firm for 15+ years, I can tell you, not many!

Related link: Newspapers are dead, get over it

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Arguments Against

Depends on how you define "newspaper"

By p_smitty - Dec 10, 2008

What defines a newspaper? Is it the "news" or the "paper"? If it's the latter, then yes, newspapers are probably going away. But I think the business of newspapers is news, and there will always be a market for professional journalism and analysis.

I doubt that in a few years you will be able to buy a New York Times at your local newsstand. But you won't need to. You'll have a Kindle in your hand that automatically delivers stories from the New York Times as they are updated. It's the same thing, just without the newsprint getting all over your hands.

You don't even need to wait a few years. I actually gave up my subscription to the Times five years ago in favor of the online version, but I still read it as much or even more than I did in print.

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Are Newspapers Dead?

THE ISSUE

Arguments For

Arguments Against

Money Issues