The future of newspapers?

[gerisullivan]

In the early 1990s, there was a single year in which a third of the typesetting shops in Minneapolis went out of business. It marked one of the many sea changes that has affected the industry pretty much since it began, and will no doubt continue long into the future. Then, it was a tipping of the balance point as more and more designers and companies embraced desktop publishing, reducing their need to send material out to a shop to be typeset.

Since then, the DTP service bureau has gone the way of the dinosaur. Service bureaus were a viable niche business for a handful of years, then became unnecessary as more and more printers began accepting electronic files directly from designers. It's so much easier to simply package and upload the files than it was to hand them off to a service bureau to have RC paper output one then had to proof and either mount on boards (with tissue overlays, film positives, or both to indicate color breaks and other production notes. Or, later, film negatives that still needed proofing and delivery to the printer.

I wonder if at the end of 2009, this year will stand out as the one where journalism in general and the newspaper industry in specific experienced its own sea change. The move online has been going on for years, but there have always been print versions of newspapers at the core. This may be the year that all changes.

Michael Hirschorn's column "End Times" in the current issue of The Atlantic is one of the signal flags. At least, that's how I'm reading his speculations about the possible outcomes of the current financial problems at the New York Times.

Or, I could easily be over-reacting, seeing Hirschorn's column just a day after reading about troubled newspapers in Chicago. Then I remember carnyjack's comments about tiny advertising sections during the run-up to Christmas. "What happened to the newspaper?" he wondered. It was a fraction the size he expected it to be. I remember benyalow's conversation with claireeddy, explaining his own move to reading all newspapers online and how he makes that work with the Wall Street Journal's subscription model.

Our troubled economic times seem likely to accelerate sea changes that were already clearly coming. I'm concerned about the massive upheaval and displacement that usually accompanies most such changes, since that in turn seems likely to exacerbate the troubled economy. And that leaves me wondering about how to turn the spiral around so it expands out, opening new paths and opportunities for people to pursue their dreams, passions, and talents in ways that also bring them economic stability and growth.

Comments

[rmeidaking.livejournal.com]

The problem with daily newspapers isn't where we read our news, it's where we place our classified ads. Daily newspapers relied heavily on classified advertising (plus automobile and real estate ads) for most of their revenue. They were tolerating the loss of casual ads to Craigslist, freecycle, eBay, etc., but when the real estate and automobile markets crashed this fall, so did their advertising revenue stream.

I do hope that the news gatherers succeed online, because if the last eight years has taught us anything, it's that we need an antagonistic press corps investigating our governments, corporations, and everything else.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

There's an extraordinary amount of citizen journalism going on in Minneapolis right now, and there are neighborhood and area newspapers that are, as far as I can tell, thriving.

K.

[sethb.livejournal.com]

I've seen an estimate that Craiglist cost newspapers billions of dollars.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

While I'm sure that's true, I would never have bought a newspaper ad for the things I've put up on Craigslist. I'm sure there are people like me, too.

[cogitationitis.livejournal.com]

The worst effect that I see of print news media going digital is access. Pretty much anyone can cough up 50c or $1, but not everyone has daily access to the Net. It will create an informed elite, while the average guy has to be satisfied with the relatively shallow reporting of TV or radio.

Also, I'll miss my coupons. (Though Sunday issues aren't in trouble.)

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Yes, Access is a major problem. As with "I don't know how X got elected -- no-one I know voted for him", we tend not to realize how unrepresentative the people we know are. A vast number (probably the majority) of the American people have either no or very little access and exposure to the internet as a source for news.

Add to this the fact (as I consider it to be) that so much of the internet so-called News is uninformed speculation or downright wrong (and sometimes deliberate fabrication). Not that the mainstream/newspaper media (or TV, or radio) are doing a great job of filtering out the garbage, but at least they generally have _some_ filters in place.

[debgeisler.livejournal.com]

I'll remind you of the future history video about Googlezon.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

The Seattle Times has shrunk noticeably in the past year, and they are laying off staff like crazy. It definitely looks like a real sea change to me, but then while I usually read the SeaTimes over lunch, I've usually gotten most of the national and international news off the web by then. I mostly get the paper to look at the sports page and box scores.

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

OK, the old business model for paying for journalism is dead. So it goes.
The problem is, we need good journalism desperately, and there doesn't seem to be a business model visible yet to pay for it. . . Plain bloggers aren't going to fill the gap.

[sethb.livejournal.com]

It's not like newspapers generally provided good journalism either.

[paulcarp.livejournal.com]

Today's (Saturday's) Seattle Post-Intelligencer announces they'll be gone in 60 days unless someone buys them out.