Chronicle of the Death of Newspapers, Foretold

Newspapers as an institution developed to lower the costs of acquiring information in a very specific setting. This was not the age of print on paper; that of course predates modern newspapers by centuries. It was the age of the rotary printed press, when the printed word was finally able to become a mass product. I have described the implications of this at length elsewhere, but I'll give the short version here.

Newspapers, as a mass product, emerged in a market that did have niche products such as peer-reviewed journals and specialized magazines. These niche products were not substitutes, however, and vice versa. A biologist trying to stay informed on the work being done in his field would not read a newspaper to do so.

However, someone looking to get quick, cheap access to a wide variety of content would more likely go for a newspaper. Sure, there are niche publications that specialize in economics, history, military analysis, science, and even comics and crossword puzzles--and these niche publications undoubtedly provided higher quality content for the specific content type that they focused on. In order to achieve the same level of variety afforded by a newspaper, however, a consumer would face prohibitively high costs--subscription costs as well as the time costs associated with going through so many different magazines, journals, puzzle and comic books one by one.

In an analogue, industrial world, newspapers served a function that a lot of consumers found to be valuable enough for their time and what little money was asked of them. In a digital, interconnected world, it is doubtful that there will remain a place for them.

Last month, Ron Rosenbaum complained that journalists have been too busy doing their job to see what was going on, and that it is unfair for new media analysts such as Jeff Jarvis to castigate them for being blindsided.

This seems odd to me, as the dire straits that newspapers have found themselves in is nothing new particularly. I may be a relative latecomer to this particular party, but Clay Shirky is not. He dug up a piece he had written in 1995 that says essentially everything Jarvis and the rest of us have been saying lately.

Google, eBay, craigslist, none of those things existed when I wrote that piece; I was extrapolating from Lycos and it was still apparent what was going to happen. It didn't take much vision to figure out that unlimited perfect copyability, with global reach and at zero marginal cost, was slowly transforming the printing press into a latter-day steam engine.

And once that became obvious, we said so, over and over again, all the time. We said it in public, we said it in private. We said it when newspapers hired us as designers, we said it when we were brought in as consultants, we said it for free. We were some tiresome motherfuckers with all our talk about the end of news on paper. And you know what? The people who made their living from printing the news listened, and then decided not to believe us.

So I'm calling bullshit on the Rosenbaum thesis, because no one has been "caught up in this great upheaval." Caught up? That makes it sound like a tornado. This change has been more like seeing oncoming glaciers ten miles off, and then deciding not to move.

In recent years, old media has made some attempts to change. Unfortunately, as Virginia Heffernan writes, this has often taken the approach of adding on new media tools to old fashioned products, with the hope that the latter would remain the "main event". This is only slapping a band-aide on a problem that may require more drastic remedies:

the content that thrives in the new distribution-and-display systems is suspiciously different from the American popular culture we used to love even 10 years ago. Thrillers, it seems, don’t flourish on Hulu. No one is reading a six-part investigative series about mayoral malfeasance on Twitter. And if it’s the afterthought message boards — the ones moderated by interns — that draw all the traffic, why are we in old media pouring so much money and time into “main event” programming that goes unread and unviewed?

Reality is not optional, as Thomas Sowell frequently points out. Newspapers cannot avoid facing Shirky's glacier forever, and it would see that the moment of truth draws ever nearer. Plagued by eroding revenue during an economic boom, it is uncertain that newspapers will be able to survive the present economic bust. Tribune Co., which owns the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and the Baltimore Sun, among other things, is filing for bankruptcy. The New York Times, the biggest in status and circulation of all American newspapers, is borrowing $225 million against one of its buildings so that they might continue to stand in front of the oncoming glacier for just a little longer.

As I've written in several places, the end of the old media model will not see a deterioration in the quality of the content we consume. While journalists may face a bleak future, more and more tools are being developed to empower consumers to aggregate niche content rather than relying on watered down mass products. Feed readers and social bookmarking help consumers keep track of content as it is produced and store it in a way that makes it easy to find again later. A plethora of tools ranging from social networks like Facebook, to instant message programs and basic e-mail, enable users to share content with one another on a massive scale.

I currently have 162 subscriptions in my Google Reader account--that number goes up and down, but for whatever reason, the average number of new "items" (that is, specific posts, articles, videos, comics, etc.) tends to hover fairly consistently around 6,000. Obviously I don't read all of those, but needless to say I have a lot of content available to me. Nevertheless, the most valuable sources of content are often my friends and family, who are constantly sending me links through e-mail, Google Talk, and Facebook. Google Reader is my personal, customized window into the world wide web--but my friends and family all have their own approaches, and point me to things I would otherwise have missed. Even if they used the same method that I do and subscribed to the exact same feeds, it's likely they would bring some items to my attention that I would otherwise have skipped over.

The coming demise of the old models of producing and distributing information is, as Shirky correctly observes, entirely predictable given that the costs of doing both have plummeted dramatically. At the moment it seems this demise will be sooner rather than later. There is no reason for alarm; we are moving to something far more effective and the transition has been in progress for well over a decade already. There were more than a few people who acknowledged that glacier and have long been preparing for it.

Hat tip: Vulgar Morality for the Heffernan piece and U Street Girl for the article about Tribune Co. filing for bankruptcy.

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