There are two aspects to what we think of as a "newspaper": the physical medium and the content - aggregation of mainstream print journalism.
The physical medium of paper is in many ways superior to our current generation of displays. It won't go away until we have daylight readable 20000:1 contrast-ratio flexible displays. That doesn't mean the print-newspaper business isn't doomed. Subscription numbers are in a nose dive, and still have a long way to fall.
Yet the aggregation of mainstream print journalism via a different medium still has a chance for success. The killer app for mainstream media is producing quality content. Bloggers can't support foreign offices, for example. Micheal Yon, Micheal Totten and other "embedded bloggers" are the exceptions that prove the rule. Distributed locality where you don't need a correspondent in, say, Beijing because Chinese Bloggers cover it, only partially solves this. There is something to be said for an expert outsider reporting news & trends.
So newspapers aren't necessarily screwed. If there were a way to directly support good content proportional to its value, good written journalism provided by online newspapers could survive and even thrive. The high hurdles of subscription and premium content and the indirect path of ad revenue aren't good enough. The article is right about the numbers.
I'm working on a startup that would allow a distributed set of people to directly support online content. In this way, newspapers could evolve to become aggregations of professional bloggers and journalists, providing high quality content for a profit.
News moving from print to web is a fundamental shift in the nature of the market, which brings many opportunities for growth by embracing the realities of the net, and a high chance of failure by ignoring those realities. Some thoughts:
The focus of the business needs to adapt to what is demanded online: giving people want they want that other sites don't give them, and conversely not providing things done better elsewhere. There is plenty of room for innovation: treating news more like data [http://www.holovaty.com/blog/archive/2006/09/06/0307], exploiting archives, focus on analysis... In short, losing the mindset of transferring print to web, sticking to core competencies, extending and innovating where appropriate, and ditching the junk.
The organisation of the business may be able to move from the monolithic style to a more networked model, with more freelancing, syndication and aggregation, more 'citizen reporters' and a blurred line between bloggers and journalists.
The big newspapers have strong brands, and for the near future most people don't want news from some random blog, or to have to trawl the net. NYT and friends are well positioned to capture the new news business. But likely many of them will refuse to change, or try and fail. So, a period of turmoil and consolidation: many papers fold, reporters shift gears and go where the money is online, the fit adapt and survive, the weak stagnate and die. But I think all those reporters, all the net-folk wanting news, and a few savvy types to put it together, will work it out in the end one way or another.
This is damning analysis, and, I think, too conservative - I think the real picture is worse for the NYT.
But, what should we, as a society, do about it? While blogs and other citizen journalism have actually helped journalism, there is still significant value in dedicated professional journalism. A significant amount of the raw material that is discussed in the political and news blogs comes from the professional sites.
Reporting is expensive and good reporting is hard - we'll be at a serious loss if someone doesn't figure out a good way to pay for it.
I suspect we're seeing a classic disruptive innovation at work here. A new technology (blogging) arrives that provides lower quality than existing markets demand, but does so at dramatically reduced cost. Existing solutions have overshot the quality levels demanded by the marketplace - the average American can't tell the difference between FOX News and the New York Times. The existing market remains, but is dwarfed in size by the new market for low-quality, shoot-from-the-hit journalism. Meanwhile, incumbents find they can't meet the cost structures necessary to compete in the new market.
I suspect that the New York Times will go the way of the Betamax and the Lisp Machine. It becomes a quaint relic of a technically superior age, but nobody actually buys it anymore.
The good news is that once a disruptive innovation has taken over the market, it usually improves to eventually match the original incumbent. So after a few years of drek, we'll see the worst, most content-free blogs die off and be replaced by people who put more thought into it. I suspect this is what'll happen to the best reporters - after a few lean years, they'll start up blogs, people will realize that those blogs give much better information than the competition, and they'll end up making much more than they ever did while working for a newspaper. After all, they don't have to share all the ad revenue they generate with the print staff anymore.
Only the best reporters, though. It'll suck to be a mediocre reporter, just as it sucks to be a mediocre real estate agent now and it sucked to be a mediocre programmer in 2002. The field will probably shrink significantly, but that's the whole point of capitalism - freeing up labor to work in fields where they'll be more productive.
I'd like to think that is true but don't see evidence to support it. For instance, blogs don't seem to solve the problem of aggregation, which requires a special group of editors to evaluate content quality.
Consequently, I wouldn't expect the best reporters to be able to make more - I'd expect the worst reporters to make the most money. That is, those that are willing to dumb down/spice up the content so that it sells well. I call this the News Corp/Myspace effect and don't see any effective counter.
Yes, but who's going to pay the intrepid journalists to go out to Iraq? That's the part of the model that I can't quite figure out yet. If the AP can't sell their content, who's reporting in Angola? Who's covering the un-sexy stuff in Nevada elections, etc.
The other is the issue of aggregation. It might just be that bloggers are the new journalists and Techmeme/GoogleNews are the new New York Times, so maybe it's not a huge problem, but overall, I think most people aren't interested in building up and filtering RSS feeds to find the news they care about.
Ok, but integrating all of that into something quickly and easily digestible, checking it for facts, and checking to see if it's even covering the whole story is still not something part of that ecosystem. There's a startup for someone, but I'm not sure it's something that's going to be tech driven...
Most popular bloggers lean towards collect stories -- they don't write them.
Blogs are a distributed newsroom: reporters and editors don't even have to know each other to outwrite and outthink the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.
Those are all politics, all the time. Something like cnn.com has a much better mix of stories, even if they're certainly not stellar journalists. People are motivated to get involved in politics stories for free (everyone has an opinion, and to judge by lots of people, don't even need much in the way of facts to have one), but much less so to go out and do real reporting.
Part of the 'disruptive innovation' model in The Innovator's Dilemma is that the innovation rapidly gains in quality. As others points out below, I don't see that happening with bloggers in much of what they 'cover'.
"... What's going to happen to all of the good reporters? ..."
If you haven't noticed, front-line, serious news gatherers have been diminishing for many years. Reducing the number of first hand source gatherers. Editors & sub-editors who read stories, check titles have greater responsibilities so last minute checks on stories with clanker titles, mistakes miss out. There has been a serious decline in the variety of sources (always bad). Younger readers are shunning traditional media (tv, radio, newspapers).
So what's happening? Is it all bad? Well yes and no. Joe public is now the news gathers with phone, sms and web in hand. Websites who specialise in particular topics gather & pick up these stories and traditional media lag behind.
The re-adjustment will occur when the new, "new media" sites are required to have greater technical, cost and professional standards. Markets will and have been re-adjusting the traditional news structure.
So does traditional media disappear?
No, they adjust, adapt or become irrelevant. At the moment - traditional journalism (reliable source gathering, questioning the status quo, looking beyond the hype, analysing ) has been the worse for wear and we are worse off for it.
I once suggested on some blog that the death of newspapers would be tragic because bloggers are almost all writing editorials (and often much better than editors do) but almost never peform reportage. Of course, I got flamed. Of course bloggers are reporters.
But "Reporting" isn't blogging. It isn't even "writing". It's going out, learning about a foreign subject in a day, driving/walking/tramping all over the place, interviewing multiple people, establishing government, police, underworld contacts, getting double and triple confirmation on key facts, adhering to rigorous journalistic ethical standards, etc. That's reporting and it isn't fun, and almost no bloggers do it--just like almost no open source writers write accounting software.
The first fatality will be local news. God knows why anybody subscribes to local papers, but they do serve the purpose of keeping an eye on local politicians, who have a tendency towards corruption. Once the local rags are gone, I dread what will happen to municipal governments...
Does the average blogger want to sit through the Lions' club chicken dinner every Sunday in order to hear the latest about councilman X. Didn't think so...
For once, myname, I'm actually going to agree with you. Blogging is, on the side of techcrunch, basically the equivalent of rewriting a press release (ok ok, sometimes he does some editorializing and "reporting" but not usually). On the side of talkingpointsmemo, it's an ongoing "I watch CSPAN and editorialize".
In the middle is what is being lost without news organizations. I'm not saying that it can't exist, it just doesn't exist yet. To fund this kind of reporting (which takes time and people) you need a revenue model that can support it and you need that journalistic ethic - the one that tells you that losing money on something is ok because it serves the public good. This ethical stance is the one basically only left amongst major newspaper organizations (the national TV news used to have it but they forgot it years ago).
"... 'Reporting' isn't blogging. It isn't even 'writing'. It's going out, learning about a foreign subject in a day, driving/walking/tramping all over the place, interviewing multiple people, establishing government, police, underworld contacts, getting double and triple confirmation on key facts, adhering to rigorous journalistic ethical standards, etc. ..."
Great points. This is one reason 'serious journalism' is threatened. Reduction of news teams, outsourcing of news bureaus, foreign correspondents mean the tasks you mention are not done to the same level. WIll the profession bounce back, adapt? Of course the next generation ( http://www.holovaty.com/resume ) are already at it and there is always the BBC, CBC and ABC.
The physical medium of paper is in many ways superior to our current generation of displays. It won't go away until we have daylight readable 20000:1 contrast-ratio flexible displays. That doesn't mean the print-newspaper business isn't doomed. Subscription numbers are in a nose dive, and still have a long way to fall.
Yet the aggregation of mainstream print journalism via a different medium still has a chance for success. The killer app for mainstream media is producing quality content. Bloggers can't support foreign offices, for example. Micheal Yon, Micheal Totten and other "embedded bloggers" are the exceptions that prove the rule. Distributed locality where you don't need a correspondent in, say, Beijing because Chinese Bloggers cover it, only partially solves this. There is something to be said for an expert outsider reporting news & trends.
So newspapers aren't necessarily screwed. If there were a way to directly support good content proportional to its value, good written journalism provided by online newspapers could survive and even thrive. The high hurdles of subscription and premium content and the indirect path of ad revenue aren't good enough. The article is right about the numbers.
I'm working on a startup that would allow a distributed set of people to directly support online content. In this way, newspapers could evolve to become aggregations of professional bloggers and journalists, providing high quality content for a profit.