When my son’s first college roommate turned out to be from Chicago, I was delighted. His family had long subscribed to the Chicago Tribune, where I worked. I thought it gave us an immediate connection. Less than two months later, they unsubscribed. This was shortly after a drastic redesign at the paper in September 2008. The roommate’s family said there was nothing in the Tribune to read anymore.
That wasn’t quite true. There was still plenty of information in the paper. But there were fewer stories, produced by fewer reporters. The stories were relentlessly local and, increasingly, came in the form of charts, graphs, maps, statistics, large fonts, and large photos—a sort of newspaper-Internet-TV amalgam that seemed more like something to be absorbed than read. For the roommate’s family—professional people who wanted sophisticated stories that included the world beyond Chicago—it wasn’t enough.
I understood. During the calamitous year of 2008—as many of us at the Tribune dutifully learned to create “dispatches” at Twitter-esque lengths, and localize national stories through pretzel-like contortions—I increasingly suspected that this approach wasn’t going to save newspapers in particular, or journalism in general. Nor would the sweeping reductions in the work force.
Here in 2010, I am even more convinced of that. I have no idea what the business plan for newspapers should be or how to monetize the Web. What I do know is that tailoring newspapers to the interests of people who never read them is futile. The magic formula, whatever it is, is not the lowest common denominator. That will be true no matter how simple and shiny and service-oriented we make them.
So why do the dailies continue to alienate the loyal readers that they still have? The figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations for the six months that ended September 2009 make the case that, for readers, less is not more. Some of the biggest weekday losers—the Los Angeles Times (-11.05 percent), the San Francisco Chronicle (-25.8 percent), the Newark Star-Ledger, (-22.22 percent), The Boston Globe (-18.48 percent), and The Dallas Morning News (-22.16 percent) to name a few—are among those who have made some of the biggest contributions to the pool of laid off, fired, or bought out journalists, some 30,000 since the start of 2008. People who buy newspapers are people who want more context, more information, more analysis—not less. So I am convinced that part of these losses stems from once-loyal subscribers who cut loose from dailies with diminished firepower and ambitions.
Less is less. It has been sobering for me to see how much my former newspaper has changed in the past year. It’s now a tabloid for street sales and a broadsheet for home delivery, and Chicago friends complain that they can zip through the tabloid version in minutes, and the broadsheet doesn’t require much more. Some 30 million people still pay for daily newspapers. Many of these readers are older, but they also tend to be affluent and loyal—the kind of people advertisers like to reach. And they aren’t afraid to take their business elsewhere if they’re not happy.
Daily ink-on-paper news may not last forever, but while we’ve still got it, we might as well leverage it to keep the business afloat until we figure out what comes next. We can no longer do that by offering something for everyone. Growth appears to go to those who exploit niches.
So here’s a niche: Instead of dumbing down the news, why not consider selectively smartening it up? This would involve hard choices, as we can’t do everything. But as newspapers cut staff and newsholes, and as they barrel down-market, they leave opportunities for people offering news expertise in areas like politics, sports, foreign affairs.
That includes Texas, where the nonprofit, online Texas Tribune, which made its debut in November, is targeting voids in politics and policy coverage left by the contractions of the big Texas dailies.
It includes San Francisco, where the Chronicle recently lost the most daily circulation in the nation. Both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal recently launched Bay Area editions featuring San Francisco-oriented news.
Dumbing down the papers is contributing to the death spiral. I think about this a lot because I grew up with three daily newspapers in our house and I read the paper-paper everyday until about 3 yrs ago. My habits changed coincidentally around the same time that Philadelphia's newspapers were gutted and sold and declined in quality. During that time major events were occurring in my city but I was learning about them after the fact; the changes and the controversies were silent to me. It was a shock to realize that I was consuming information almost continuously throughout the day among multiple platforms of web, radio, and tv but I was profoundly ill-informed on important local issues that affect my life.
In that situation the antidote was to get involved with community groups and to participate in formal citizen-engagement events that were funded by foundations and administered jointly by journalists from the papers and local public radio. The focus was the mayor's race and waterfront development but the medium was in-person presentations and conversations. And it was good. But the hoopla has died down and now I get my important news online from the paper and other sources. I also opted for the free Metro during that time because they were coming out with better information about those important issues at the same time that the real papers either didn't get it or they were intently interested in preventing the public from full awareness of the facts and their significance (my deep suspicion at the time). It was those issues that made me realize how good the papers had been, were no longer, and how much I had trusted the papers but no longer do. (I feel like the papers are holding my local news hostage, frankly, so I can't completely turn away from them, no matter how awful its website or its dwindling print format.)
So I've given this whole issue a lot of thought and my current take on the situation is to not buy into the myth that technology killed the newspapers. I am now looking at the newspaper crisis as like that of the Dust Bowl in the '30's. The Dust Bowl was an agrarian, human, and economic catastrophe that had multiple consequences and causes. But no one would ever say that our civilization no longer needs farming or its products because the economic model failed in the 1930's. The Dust Bowl was caused by climate change in combination with damaging farming practices such as the failure to rotate crops. Their drought might be comparable to the collapse of advertising which supported print media so well for so long. And as farming developed an exploitative relationship with the land, it may be fair to say that media consolidation resulted in comparable consequences that could not sustain good journalism when the soil dried up and the wind blew away the shallow roots (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl).
One enduring aftermath of the Dust Bowl is the collapse of family farms and the rise of giant agri-business, which Michael Pollan links so compellingly to our nation's energy and obesity crises. Good journalism might be comparable to the practice of crop rotation; it's failure might be one important factor contributing to journalism's dust bowl. I think an overlooked climate change issue is the collapse of advertising which may have been a canary in the economic coal mine suggesting that the real economy began to decline much earlier than its official onset in 2007/2008 (and might be far worse than officially acknowledged). If our culture shifts swiftly and entirely to electronic media, I believe we will experience troubling outcomes such as an unwitting apartheid of important information that reaches the desk-based workforce but leaves out other, important groups of our population. So I recognize the significance of the disruptive changes of our time but it's too easy to blame the internet.
#1 Posted by MB, CJR on Fri 29 Jan 2010 at 11:40 AM
Yes and yes! As a longtime Trib subscriber, I sometimes have the feeling, "Dude, where's my paper?" Especially in the '80s and to an extent in the '90s, the Trib had wonderful writing and reporting, an array of columnists (paging Bob Greene), and excellent local media and entertainment coverage from the likes of Steve Daley. Okay, it was a little grey and there were articles from foreign countries, but in a way that added to the "eminence grise" sense of ponderous yet trustworthy authority. Now we get pointlessly huge photos of some poor inner-city kid and hardly any coverage of a certain important guy from Chicago. My husband and I still get the Trib -- the inertia of habit -- but also the suburban-focused Daily Herald and, yes, the Times. We're smart, relatively affluent and read ads. And as boomers we're (hopefully) not exactly shuffling off the landscape yet. I agree with Lisa Anderson: it's good business to focus on your core consumer.
#2 Posted by Elizabeth, CJR on Tue 23 Feb 2010 at 01:36 PM