

How newspapers can survive - tokenadult
http://edition.cnn.com/2012/03/20/opinion/barth-newspapers-decline/index.html

======
guimarin
This argument fell flat for me as soon as I read that newspapers are the only
ones left to hold the gov't and wall street accountable. Newspapers are
corporate for-profit entities, and like all media companies they are owned by
the people they 'report' on.

In the traditional sense, newspapers will not survive. I believe that
independent journalism will survive, as people like me move to curated content
services, and pay for valuable new stories. The way to do this is to combine
the kickstarter model and the steam model. Small teams of topical reporters
post stories that they want to write and/or pursue, and potential readers bid
on them to do so. Then when the content is finished they can distribute it
through a global distribution channel, like a Steam for news media content.
You can bundle subscriptions from your favorite news teams, get the 'all
inclusive package' get the just 'sports and gossip' package, or whatever else
works.

Sure a lot of content will seep out there for free, but the kickstarter-like
company can add value by explaining to people the importance of funding these
teams. As teams get established they can get to a level of continuous funding,
or at least for X # of months at a time, that way they can do indepth whistle-
blowing type stories, without having to give away what they want to do in the
original kickstarter.

I have only just started thinking of this, so I'm sure there are many holes to
be worked out. Nevertheless, I do want this industry to 'pivot' into success
because I do think they provide an important social good.

~~~
va_coder
I agree. Case in point: the housing bubble. I frequently read from a blog
called thehousingbubbleblog from 2004 to 2008 and learned about the looming
crisis from all kinds of insiders - mortgage folks, appraisers, etc. On the
other hand, my local newspaper, with an enormous Sunday Real Estate section,
rarely reported on it and when they did it always ended with a spokesman from
the Realtors association who would put their spin on it.

------
drucken
TL;DR. Stop pleading. Start actually finding news!

The final three paragraphs seemed like a plea for government or government-
related funding. That is, for the public to pick up the tab because they do
read news (just not from them).

While this can work quite well as part of a general public media body, you
rarely expect cutting edge investigative journalism from such public
organisations who face their own funding and political justification pressures
constantly.

At the end of the day, newspapers are struggling because they have created a
model that does not differentiate themselves from anyone else.

This is especially the case when it took something like Wikileaks, which has
always considered itself to be as much a journalism organisation as a
whistleblowing haven, to show how little newspapers contribute to new
knowledge, and if anything are merely tools of others.

The second function of newspapers, as a sort of social bulletin board system
is being slowly undermined by new media, however on this front, the more
locally-connected papers seem to be faring quite well for now. Though in the
end, even these will be unable to catch up to the speed and breadth of updates
available via new media, unless they embrace it themselves.

No matter what failings it may have otherwise had, Wikileaks and now others
have demonstrated that at core crowdsourced news can be a compelling model, IF
you operate a highly _trustworthy and ethical_ platform, for example. That
said, nothing can really replace true investigative journalism.

------
barthjg
Hi:

Since I wrote this I just want to clarify that I did not say that newspapers
were the only ones in the accountability business; I intentionally said news
media, which is a wide swath that also is meant to include certain bloggers
and others. Newspapers do NOT have a monopoly on that.

Also, I intentionally did not include 'government related funding' in my
mention of what's worth learning from public media's business model. I
stressed the role of listeners and the value that public media has been able
to gain from developing a reliable and meaningful RELATIONSHIP with listeners.
That has taken 40 years to build.

I agree that investigative reporting is a high point and necessary one for
journalism, but let's not discount the importance of day in, day out reporting
that informs and accurately reflects the life, doings, role, malfeasance of
institutions and people of a community. There are some impressive local blogs
and sites that do an ambitious job of capturing a pretty full picture of what
is going on. My hat's off to them. They need support. Reporting on scandals
and forcing out the scoundrels is only one measure of the value of a good news
outfit.

Newspaper ownership is a mixed bag; some owners would not know the First
Amendment if it bit them. But then there is the McClatchy chain whose DC
bureau did some of the most outstanding and aggressive reporting on the lead
up to the Iraq War. No one paper or news organization performs well or poorly
all the time. But I take the point of one poster here, I think, that a
newspaper is only as good as its owners' and leaderships' commitment to
independence and the role of an aggressive press.

What is killing a lot of papers -- and my op ed only touches on the mix of
factors -- is high production costs, debt and relevance of these brands and
forms to audiences with many other choices. The NYTimes HAS an audience, so
does the WSJournal. But so does Google and Slashdot and Mashable and Gawker.
The news space is crowded with a lot of value for new audiences hungry for the
right mix. If you find your news sites valuable to you, then support their
business model. What we need are credible, accurate and competitive news
businesses.

Thank you all for the thoughtful feedback. This is the sort of debate and
discussion I was hoping the oped would generate.

Finally, this crazy notion that journalism is not that hard. It is. Good
journalism is very hard, demanding, damning and public. Go to a crime scene at
2AM, or into a courtroom, or try an election night and let's see how good you
are at getting the story of what is going on. Only an uninformed cynic would
think that ANY profession done well is 'easy.'Take a look at the LV Sun link I
included - that investigation into patient deaths and suffering at local
hospitals was groundbreaking work. Not at all 'easy.'

-John

------
tomjen3
They can't. Not because they can't make money online but because they are not
worth the paper they are printed on -- this includes newspapers such as the
NYT.

Ask yourself: when was the last time the NYT published a story that cause a
scandal and forced a politician to retire? A couple of years ago? For it to be
worth more than the paper it is printed on, it has to be at least once a week
-- there are enough scandales to choose from.

But of course printing filler is cheaper.

~~~
tokenadult
How is the record of online nonnewspaper reporting in forcing politicians to
resign or exposing other scandals? And how do we establish causation (that any
one story brought someone down) in a world where many readers, for example
nearly all readers of HN, get their news from multiple sources?

AFTER EDIT:

Taking into account the other thoughtful replies here, I remember reading in
the mainstream print press (Business Week) about the housing bubble no later
than 2005, and I'm sure that wasn't the only mainstream source pointing out
that housing prices made no sense in the mid-2000s. The print publication The
Economist was also referring to inflated housing costs in several countries,
notably Spain, before the bubble burst. One problem any news source has in
establishing credibility in predicting problems is hindsight bias: once a
problem blows up, it's "easy to see" that the problem was inevitable, but
until it blows up, plenty of people are making money off of betting that they
can stay solvent the whole time the market stays irrational, and no amount of
responsible journalism seems sufficient to overcome that kind of mass
delusion.

~~~
tomjen3
The comperative record does not matter -- simply reading the newspaper is a
waste of time.

As for correlation -- who broke the scandal? The newspaper that did that gets
the point. Did multiple newspapers break it at the same time? Then nobody gets
a point, since it is only worth paying for unique stories.

------
stcredzero
Newspapers were providing a valuable service, but were funding the bills and
the payroll by selling ads. Sounds familiar.

------
InclinedPlane
They are in a bed of their own making.

They made the news a commodity because it lowered their costs and raised their
profit margins. They trained readers to be shallow and emotional, to skim for
the high level details and ignore deeper analysis, to be easily swayed by
cheap "human interest" reporting. They sold themselves out to national chains
and ignored the interests of their community.

And now we are supposed to feel sorry for them?

Newspapers have always been sort of a sham. Propped up by the fact that for
centuries it was an enormous challenge just to get any sort of information
from beyond the horizon, let alone accurate or timely information. The bar has
always been low, and it has always been easiest to skate by on doing little
more than repeating what someone else has said but putting it in a nice little
easily consumed package (length, writing style, format, etc.) But the barriers
to information dissemination have fallen, fast and decisively. And now all of
the access, publishing infrastructure, and tricks of the trade that kept the
newspapers rich in the past are useless.

In the end it's not a bad thing. There has always been a very profound and
wide reaching problem in that journalists have as a rule, and especially
toward the last half of the 20th century, been trained in that abstract
subject of "journalism". A reporter is a journalist first and then has some
specialty as a minor side note to their core competency of generic journalism.
The big problem with that is that journalism is not actually that hard. But
elevating it to such a high level diminished the importance of "secondary"
knowledge in a reporter, such as expertise in the subject they are covering.
We've all been witness to the problems this creates. The "science" reporter
can barely understand the subject their covering and they routinely make
errors which significantly damage the quality of their reporting. That problem
has been endemic to journalism for decades.

Journalists who know a lot about the business, how to format a story, how to
write a hook to get people interested, but who are as ignorant of the subject
matter as a high school sophomore tasked to do a surprise report on a country
they've never heard of. Yes there have been exceptions, in rare cases there
have been reporters who were experts or who had a strong knowledge of the
material they covered, but outside of sports reporting this has always been
the exception. Because the difficulty of getting the story out to people in a
format that was accessible was primary.

The value of the specialty skill of "journalism" is far, far less important
today due to modern communications technology, making the very significant and
real short-comings of traditional journalism all the more glaring.

Sorry reporters but I think your days are ultimately numbered. The ideal
future I see is one where experts learn how to communicate, not where
communicators learn how to fake looking like experts. If you want to be a part
of that future I suggest going back to school or otherwise spending a lot of
time becoming an expert on something important other than how to arrange
letters into a 2 inch wide column.

P.S. Another enormous problem is that the media has become part of the
establishment, and has blatantly fallen down on its job to challenge the
establishment and report on the key issues of the day instead of merely
serving up infotainment and pablum.

