What Will Happen When the Presses Go Silent?

The Boston Globe had a story the other day about the travails of the Portland Press Herald last week, and it included a plaintive and intriguing question from a reader of the struggling, up-for-sale Maine paper:

"Can you even be a major city without a daily paper?"

We're going to find out the answer to that before very long, I'm afraid. And it's worth thinking about what such a city will look like.

No, its skyscrapers will not fall, its roads will not collapse, its populace will not move out en masse. In fact, I'll bet that whatever city loses its daily paper–and it will only be the first of many–will continue to be a major city, pretty much unabated. Its media landscape will change, but in ways that may be much less radical than many people think.

Let's think about an imaginary major American city–let's call it Whoville–and its media ecosystem. Today, Whoville has a major daily paper (the Whoville Bugle), four network TV stations with news departments, an AP bureau, an alt-weekly, a weekly business tabloid, a couple of weekly (or daily) ethnic papers, college papers, perhaps an all-news radio station (and at least a couple stations that still do some local news), a ring of suburban papers–mostly weekly, maybe a couple daily–and perhaps a handful of in-city neighborhood weeklies.

Sounds like a lot, doesn't it? And that's just the traditional media. Whoville and it's 'burbs also are bristling with new media. There are enough local online news and bloggers that Examiner.com and Outside.In each can devote a dedicated channel to aggregating Web content about the city.  Craigslist, Yelp, Citysearch and others have beachheads in the market, offering classifieds and reviews that are especially appealing to younger readers. Local outposts of MerchantCircle, Kudzu and other online business directories and Yellow Pages wannabes target local businesses.  Local restaurant bloggers, sports bloggers and other specialists write about things they're interested in.

Whoville's suburbs have blogs, as well, and perhaps a startup hyperlocal site or two. Just about every neighborhood has some sort of listserv or Yahoo group on which neighbors exchange information. And there are any number of specialty newsletters, Web sites, mailing lists and publications that serve specific audiences, ranging from PTAs to moms to local hobbyist groups. Oh, and of course, there's WhovilleBugle.com, the daily paper's Web site, not to mention Web sites for the local TV and radio stations and the community papers.

All of these media outlets are competing for readers in Whoville and its suburbs; most of them are competing for advertisers, too. In other words, there's a lot more to the Whoville media ecosystem than just the Bugle. And I'm sure I left a few things out (every market has a slightly different collection of local media, of course).

It is precisely this growth in competition that has helped to make the Bugle's financial position so tenuous. Surrounded by competitors that are picking off different audiences and advertisers and offering services for free that used to be revenue streams for the paper, the Bugle has been eaten to death by fleas (some of them very large fleas!). Once king of the jungle, it's now just another player–albeit probably the dominant player–in the Whoville media.

Now let's take the Bugle out of that mix.

The Bugle's owner, frustrated by mounting losses and departing advertisers and readers, decides to close up shop. It shuts the paper, idles the presses, and lays off the staff. (There are somewhat less dire versions of this situation, in which the print product disappears but the Web site remains, or the print product is drastically reduced to perhaps publishing a couple times a week, but for the sake of argument, let's go with the full doomsday scenario.)

What happens? The entire Whoville media ecosystem, described above, steps up to pick off the Bugle's advertisers and readers. Some of the media outlets that were dependent on the Bugle's coverage to inspire their content (e.g. TV news and bloggers) will learn to look to other sources. But there's already a lot of diverse media in Whoville serving local news and information needs, and they'll fill a lot of the gap left by the death of the paper.

Inevitably, a group of ex-Bugle staffers, backed by local money, will start the Whoville Daily Trumpet, a fraction the size of the Bugle but much more focused on the city itself. The new paper will leave suburban coverage to the community papers and be smart enough to not even mess with national and international news that's available in a zillion places. With more focus, a much leaner business plan, hungry ad sales reps and hired printing and distribution, the Daily Trumpet can be competitive in ways the bloated, overextended Bugle could not be. 

Many other ex-staffers will join the other existing media, beefing up their staffs and smarts. Still others will start blogs or small print or online media outlets to cover specific topics. Not all of these will make it, but many of them will, covering things the Bugle used to cover and serving various parts of the old Bugle audience.

Indeed, a year or two after the Bugle's demise left a seemingly enormous hole in the city's media landscape, that hole will essentially be gone. It will be filled by thriving, competitive media that already exist and a few new outlets that spring up in the wake of the newspaper's closing.  The Whoville media ecosystem will prove to be self-repairing, much more quickly than a lot of people would expect. The residents of Whoville and its suburbs will get their news and information from these old and new replacements, and advertisers will use those substitutes for the Bugle to reach those customers. 

The Whoville Bugle will be a nostalgic memory of local life–much like the Whoville Herald, the afternoon paper that closed without much of a fuss a generation ago, or the Whoville Daily News, which quietly bit the dust a generation before that. The Bugle will be toasted at annual reunions of the staff and remembered in dusty collections at the library and historical society, but it will soon be seen as yesteryears' news.

Let's get back to the original question. Will Whoville still be a major city? Sure. It will still have its various corporate headquarters, beautiful architecture and parks, international airport, pro sports teams, a thriving music scene, opera, theater, good restaurants, great neighborhoods and all of the other things that make up a major city. It just won't have its old-fashioned daily newspaper. And sorry, but the Bugle really won't be missed.

Comments

[Alan]

Hi,

People seem to forget that the key word in newspaper is news, not paper. So, the medium may change, but people will still want their news on whatever medium they prefer.

Regards,

Alan

[Paul]

Hello

The medium IS the message (M McLuhan, 1964)
So, the medium needs to change/be changed

Regards

[Simon]

We're watching the same issues play our in Australia.

http://www.ourpatch.com.au/australia/users/hunterdundee/blogs/518-is-ourpatch-the-future-of-local-news

I agree we're not going to miss these local papers. There are already a host of new players coming into the market to fill these gaps and ensure local people get what they want i.e. access to local news and local business advertising. I think these changes will also breed a new class off journalist.

[Russell Nelson]

There's two kinds of people in the world: those who welcome the future, and those who try to fend it off. Interestingly, you'll find both liberals and conservatives in the both camps, making a hash of the old consortia. I'm in the first camp: the future doesn't scare me. The first fifty years of my life have been great; I expect the second fifty to be just as good. Now, if they could only get flying cars and jetpacks working, we'd be all set.

[Working Reporter]

I find this an incredibly optimistic scenario. Rather than run the thought experiment the way you did -- where the Whoville Bugle is one component in a media ecosystem -- I'd push the ecosystem analogy even further to include a critical concept: the food chain.

Forget about newspaper vs blog vs web site vs citizen media. These labels are irrelevant. The important players in the media ecosystem are: content gatherer; content aggregator; content analyzer; content user.

Of all the media entities you describe, only one -- the Whoville Bugle -- is a significant content creator. It is the plankton in the media food chain. The other entities all play their valuable roles of discussion, analysis, and consumption, but the Bugle is the food source.

This isn't because it's printed on paper or because newspapers are "real" journalists and nobody else can aspire to the title. It's because only the Bugle has a revenue stream adequate to pay people full time to gather content. That's the sole distinction. But it's critical.

Your thought experiment assumes that with the Bugle out of the equation, the rest of the media food chain will pick up the slack. That's where I believe you're being optimistic. Because in the real world, none of those models are making enough money to pay for significant content gathering. The absolute pinnacles of the online model are places like TPM -- tiny staff, many unpaid interns, minimal (though often quite good) content creation; and the HuffPost, paid staff one, content creation minimal.

If those entities, which are widely seen as the best the online world has produced as a business model, can't pay for significant -- particularly local -- content creation, why do you assume the Whoville Daily Trumpet will do any better?

Newspapers on average make abut 7 percent of their revenue from their online product; if the Trumpet captured all of that revenue (unlikely), it could pay for 7 percent of the Bugle's staff. Do you think any major city would be well served by 7 percent of its current newspaper?

I'd love it if you were right; I've been dying to see an online news model appear that thrives financially without taking most of its content from a newspaper. But if there's one out there, I haven't seen it.

It's tempting to say, "People are clever, and things will work out fine." But that's the kind of logic we once applied to the dying of plankton in the seas. Eventually, we woke up to the fact that the problem wasn't going to fix itself, and we needed to take steps to fix it ourselves.

Same thing here. The folks giddy about the death of dead tree news should take some time to really dig into where their news originates. Go down the food chain and take a look at the plankton. By and large, it's printed on paper.

[edward]

For working reporter: The trouble is that the red tide is killing the plankton. Morningstar has a study online projecting steady declines in revenue for the four newspapers it looked at for the next five years, and I believe other privately-held papers will see similar results. The layoffs and buyouts have hit newsrooms hard, partly because they are being carried out by managers who want to keep their jobs and think they can still put out newspapers with a dwindled staff. That only results in rewritten press releases, space-filling and mindless whos'-in-who's-out features and skimpy stories with a lot of color pictures (see the Orlando Sentinel, Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel for e.g.) So the plankton isn't being generated in the volume that it once was. I also invite you to take a second look at some of these local blogs, and you will find original plankton manufacturing work there. Look at Gannett Watch in the last week, and you will see news being made that Gannett itself didn't want to be made.
I believe what we are seeing is a shattering of the traditional local media's grip on local news, and I am not sure yet we know all that means. There is a great potential here for political manipulation by local economic forces who are very happy to see their newspaper collapse, and I am not sure how to put the trust in an Internet site that I put in a newspaper.
Where I disagree with Potts is that I think the dead tree part isn't going to just lay down and die. There will be a fight-back at some point, and so I am not quite ready to say print is dead. They still create a huge revenue stream in good times, and this recession will end some day. The supermarket industry still relies on dead tree products to get their information out, and even in these bad times, there are full-page ads because some businesses see newspaper ads as the most efficient way of spending the least to reach the most. I also think Potts is falling into the old and fatal flaw looking at the increase in on-line spending and believing the up-line will continue to be an up-line into the future. We are already seeing reports of declining online revenues, and some of these Internet concerns are as badly financed as the dead tree industry they hope to replace.

[Mickey Skinner]

An article in the August 18 edition of the Wall Street Journals Media and Marketing stated that the Los Angeles Times has tapped an outsider to be the fourth publisher in the last eight years. His job is to try and jump start the Times back to profitability. I say the task can't be accomplished. The LA Times and the New York Times are the two most liberal papers in the United States. They have run rough shod over the news for so long with left leaning liberalism.

People now have other sources and venues for their news. They don't have to read the tainted liberal stories and opinions with so many other available options.

Selling newspapers is not like selling toilet paper. Toilet paper is something that people will always need. People might start buying papers if they started reporting the news the way it happened and not the way the editors and reporters wanted it to happen. In other words, people need toilet paper but they don't need the LA Times.

In 1863 Robert E. Lee said and I quote: "It appears that we have appointed our worse generals to command forces, and our most gifted and brilliant to edit newspapers. In fact, I discovered by reading newspapers that those editor/geniuses plainly saw all my strategic defects from the start, yet failed to inform me until it was too late.

Accordingly, I am readily willing to yield my command to these obviously superior intellects, and I will, in turn, do my best for the cause by writing editorials- after the fact."

[edward]

I seem to recall that Robert E. Lee lost, so maybe his fortunes on the battlefield would have improved if he had listened to those dissenting voices, instead of dismissing them.

[Rick Waghorn]

WorkingReporter...

Finding a viable reward structure for those of us lucky enough to be charged with sparking informed conversations among our passionate niche communities is, indeed, the key... step forward Sir Tim...

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=128

[carl]

I have been toying with a new concept: "Sustainable News" We've all heard this word lately, but mostly in relation to environmental sustainability. Basically, something that is self-sustaining needs less outside input.

As daily newspapers are dropping like flies, I've been thinking about news in this context. To me, why should a community rely solely on a third party news provider to spoon feed them the news. Why doesn't the community itself take on that responsibility with some professional freelance journalists. Spot.US is on the right track and I think this can be included in a context of our beta site at www.iSedona.com where the community posts the news it as rich a media format as it wants. Let the community post most of the news and pay a freelance writer for the rest. Who needs a newspaper company anymore???

[edward]

for carl:
Good start. I hope you can sustain it over time. A cautionary note from watching other sites like http://pajamasmedia.com/ is to resist getting into politics, or you will be taken over by freerepublic types. Pajamasmedia started out well with local stories that looked like they were written by local people, but since has taken a completely different path as political discussions have taken it over. I am sure you are also aware of the Washington Post's effort to start its own local site for one of the Virginia suburban counties http://loudounextra.washingtonpost.com/ It has not been a great success largely because I don't think the Washington Post understands the jurisdiction.

[The Wordyeti]

I agree with this scenario, in principle. I've long felt that the media landscape should be viewed as an ecosystem, and that "Nature abhors a vacuum." Society needs a way to have a conversation with itself, to disseminate information. It's an intrinsic function, a fat space in the ecosystem. Thus, there will be some person/entity/cooperative that will fill it.

This is already happening in a few places around the U.S. I've written about a couple of them.

I'm not happy about the way this is playing out, however. In the short term, I think that we've already seen the damage caused by crippled and distracted news disseminators - the national discourse is polluted with trivialities, and we can't as a people, seem to agree on what our priorites are, or should be (although missing white girls are apparently somewhere near the top).

A prime example of that was the comment by Skinner, above, who attempts to forge a link between macroeconomic forces such as the rise of the New Media and Craigslist, and changing societal information intake patterns to some political agenda. Focusing on content-side "spin" as the source of financial difficulties may satisfy the bwah-ha-ha'ing of hate radio hosts, but in the really real world, is not connected to the impending death of newspapers. (If that were true, right-wing newspapers would be flourishing. They are not.)

The problem is not that there will be nothing to replace newspapers and the "plankton" creation function when they implode. The problem is going to be aggregating the plankton to a level on the food chain where we can start to once again agree on what should be paid attention to at what level (i.e. is a local company poisoning the water table a local story, or should it be Love Canal II?).

We're stumbling into the future; the ecosystem is trying to invent itself, but we're doing it at a vastly quicker pace than has ever been done before. The top-down efforts to impose some kind of solution on this dilemma are doomed to failure...

[David]

As media evolves the need for new outlets in information is imminent. The change wil always occur even past the extinction of traditional newspaper printing. However, perhaps the most recognizable thing within news organization is not the news but rather the playes giving you the news. Credibility is everything within this industry,\. Readers and viewers must trust their news source which gives rise to corporation and news empires such as the Bugle as opposed to citizen journalist or sect which are for the most part self ordained. The cycle of large scale news versus the nich markets will always reoccur with the need for people to see a forefront or all knowing voice in their local media which then allows for a sub-sect. Without a major news presence the niche publications would not exist and so forth. And so it continues with the niche becoming the foremost voice to be thenthwarted by the niche of the niche.