Don't Let Them Fail

Print newspapers are in trouble of going out of business all across the country, and we can’t let this happen. An article yesterday in the NY Times (link) talks about the trend of large cities with two major papers are facing the economic crunch by turning into one paper towns, and one paper markets are facing the realities of life without a major local newspaper.

This is a trend that must be stopped.

A lot of you are probably thinking that maybe the fall of the printed newspaper won’t be such a bad thing, that they can survive in electronic form, and, indeed, some folks make that argument in the Times piece. I believe that those people are sadly mistaken.

Yes, some form of the newspapers will likely survive and live on the Internet, but it will hardly be a newspaper. I cannot imagine online ad revenues funding a newsroom (or if they can fund the newsroom, it’ll almost certainly be a skeleton crew of reporters) outside of a bare minimum of editors. And these editors very likely won’t be doing a huge amount of reporting, but, rather, will be in charge of pulling stories from newswires like Reuters and the Associated Press (AP).

It is not my intention here to say that newswires do not report quality news, they do. The problem that would arise is twofold.

First, this would basically eliminate local news. Newswires don’t make their money by reporting local news stories, they generally provide only national and international news stories and provide smaller, regional papers (that can’t afford international correspondents) with their world news. While some of you might think that national and international news is the only news worth reading, I think you’d be missing out so so much. Book reviews, the classifieds, job listings, film reviews, music reviews, restaurant reviews, editorials, the culture section, local sports beats, arts, entertainment, local event listings, local nightlife information, local features, local flavor, local vernacular … all of this and more would be completely eliminated from your life. Sure, some of it would be replaced by random online sites, but it’ll be a hodgepodge of different sites that likely will not cover everything quite the same way a well-run newspaper would.

The second issue involves something that is often complained about now: monopoly. One complaint about the current news industry is that large papers (NY Times, Wall Street Journal, LA Times) have a monopoly of news reporting. I don’t agree with this, but it’s a fair complaint. The NY Times is almost universally considered the Paper of Record, but I’m just fine with that. Imagine what would happen if even half of America’s major cities took the majority of their news from one of three major newswires? Now that would constitute a monopoly (or oligopoly, I suppose) of news reporting. 

Newspapers need to find new revenue. I, for one, think that charging for online readership is just the way to do it. Online viewers far outnumber hard-copy readers, and since a major source of revenue (print ads) have disappeared recently, new subscriptions from online readers would significantly boost revenue, even if it scared away some readers (I would definitely pay a monthly/yearly fee for a trusted source of news).

A world without trusted major newspapers is one that I not only can’t imagine, but don’t want to be a part of. Newspapers need to bite the bullet, make like the Journal and charge for online material. Readers need to suck it up and pay for it.