When the News Gets Old

It's no secret that in a world of news at Twitter speed, print seems to be getting left farther and farther behind. Like others, I've written about this a couple times previously, and of course there was the Daily Show's fabulously snarky take on "aged news" a couple of years ago.

But the stunning, thrilling events of the past few hours in Egypt have highlighted, yet again, how much the news business has changed, and how bad newspapers look as a result. Newspapers were printed last night—barely making deadline as it was, because the story broke fairly late—with headlines blaring that Hosni Mubarak was refused to step down in Egypt.

But with the ink still drying this morning, those papers quickly became woefully out of date. Their Web sites have been updated with the news of Mubarak's resignation, of course, but the papers were still selling print editions that were, well, wrong. Guess they'll correct it in tomorrow's paper. (To give credit where credit is due, incidentally, Rupert Murdoch's iPad news app, The Daily, has quickly broken free of the strictures of its name and begun offering more frequent updates.)

This wasn't really a problem for newspapers a generation or so ago. Back then, they were pretty much the only source of news, save for TV coverage (at least of important events) and radio news. But the advent of the Web, Twitter, mobile news apps, multiple cable news channels and any number of other new competitors is more and more rendering print newspapers, in their traditional form, obsolete.

The fast-breaking Mubarak story is an unfortunate example of how horribly behind the times newspapers can seem (and I don't just mean their management). But the truth is, smaller examples of print news obsolescence now appear multiple times throughout newspapers, as stories change after presstime. They simply can't keep up with the faster news competitors surrounding them anymore.

What are newspapers to do? A couple thoughts: First, maybe it's time for papers to stop trying to be the snapshot of the previous day's events. Rather than print information that's almost instantly out of date, they should concentrate on providing more analysis, perspective, context, non-news-pegged features and forward-looking coverage—much like a newsmagazine. That would require a major change in editor-think, but it would better reflect the new world. The whole "newspaper of record" thing is now pretty passé.

More fundamentally, this is an argument for papers to double down on their quicker digital news-delivery products. They need to finally come to grips with the idea that the product to which they still devote the vast majority of their resources—that print edition—shouldn't be getting primacy in management attention and resource allocation. Unfortunately, in just about every newspaper newsroom I know of, the digital version is very much a second-class citizen, while most of the attention still goes to putting out a product that's immediately out of date. That strikes me as poor priortization. The news—and the audience—now exist in a real-time digital world. Shouldn't that be where resources are focused? The print edition should be the afterthought.

One personal story from today's events in Egypt: Just after Mubarak announced his resignation, I tore myself away from watching Al Jazeera TV's terrific coverage to take my car down to a local service station for a state inspection. The guy who does the inspections is Egyptian—and he greeted me at the service bay door holding a smartphone tuned to Al  Jazeera TV. He had a giant smile on his face. "Did you hear the news? Did you hear the news?" he exulted. I told him I had, and congratulated him on the triumph of his people.

Of course, if he'd relied on the "news' in the printed Washington Post being sold a few feet away, he wouldn't have known about his country's liberation. 

 

PS: In some ways, this is even worse: The online version of The Wall Street Journal's print front page gives no hint that the news had changed since the paper was set in type last night. (This screenshot was taken nearly 12 hours after Mubarak resigned.)

That's really inexcusable. Yeah, sure, that "In Today's Paper" page on WSJ.com is supposed to be the representation of the print edition. But it's an HTML page, not a PDF, and thus can be updated. Would it be so hard to add a line below the lead story pointing to the latest developments elsewhere on the site? That's just odd.

Comments

[SBAnderson]

I first saw the NYT story breaking the AOL/Huffington Post deal at 11 p.m. on my iPad. Two mornings -- 30 hours! -- later, imagine the eye-roll when I saw the big fat headline on my daily paper's business front: "AOL buys Huffington Post." Good grief. . . . .Inching ever closer to the La Brea Tar Pits, sadly, with bumbles like these.

[twitter.com/williampietri]

I think another way to look at it is: what kind of market need would an online-only company be trying to fill if they launched a daily paper version today?

I can think of a number of not-entirely-crazy scenarios, but none of them look much like the sort of thing that ends up in the newspaper box on my corner. And if there's not a lot of reason to make a new one, that's a sign we may not need the old ones. Not as currently constituted, anyhow.

[Mark Potts]

William: Thanks for that comment. It reminds me of a joke you hear in news-entrepreneurial circles: If you went to a venture capitalist with the idea to hire a bunch of people to cover the news and sell advertising, print one version of it a day on crushed paper, load it into trucks, drive around in the middle of the night and throw it on people's lawns and front stoops, the VC would throw you out of the office. Sure, it's historically been a profitable business, and in a diminished way still is—but the future lies elsewhere.

[Elaine Clisham]

I agree completely with your points about newspapers' need to refocus their resources, but I would add that it doesn't need to be a zero-sum, print-or-Twitter decision. Today's printed newspaper has huge significance for those whose lives will change as a result of events in Egypt -- they can frame it, have their photos taken with it, show it to their grandchildren. It's a saveable snapshot of history, and that is a very important "job to be done," even for people who streamed the news on their iPhones. Case in point: How many of us kept a newspaper from Nov. 5, 2008?

[twitter.com/williampietri]

Heh. I should have known that was obvious enough to achieve well-known-joke status. But the joke is exactly right; you wouldn't get past the point where you say, "So then we slice the trees real thin..."

As an entrepreneur, I wonder to what extent people in the news business really understand the core of what they do. When I'm looking at startups, I try to understand what real-world needs people are trying to satisfy, and what common human behaviors they're trying to integrate with. Without those needs and behaviors, you don't have a business.

From the way you describe it, it sounds like plenty of people think they're still in the newspaper business, rather than, say, the business of keeping people up to date on their community and the world, which is what the newspaper business was born out of.

For a while the two were the same thing, so I can see how people could get confused. But I don't understand how people professionally obligated to keep track of the world could still think that the newspaper business is any more sustainable than the horse-and-buggy business circa 1925. Is it just, as Sinclair said, that "If a man's paycheck depends on his not understanding something, you can rely upon his not understanding it." Or is there something more subtle going on?