No News is Bad News: The Future of Print Media

Even though newspapers are arguably more popular than ever before, instead of seeing higher profits, the reality is they’re earning less – a fact that is leading to industry wide buyouts, reductions in staff and in some cases, permanent closures.  The current model of how newspapers operate is clearly broken and the biggest contributing factor, might be us.

During the ongoing transition from print to online, we’ve come to expect the same amount and quality of content we’re accustomed to, only now we want it for free.  A bitter pill that traditional media outlets have been able to swallow in the short term, owing to their deep coffers and steady print readership numbers, but as both have started drying up, drastic changes have followed.   Consequently, the current conundrum – cutbacks are made, causing readership to fall off, resulting in advertising dollars being lost – a cycle with and obvious end game. 

Not that newspapers are completely beyond reproach however. They underestimated the online space, believing that they could simply replicate their publications on the web and the public would follow. This was half right, though as we noted, they weren’t willing to pay for this information, a small detail with large repercussions.  This problem was supposed to be solved by internet advertising, but even if we ignore the slippery slope above, this model hasn’t proven capable of generating high enough profit margins.  

Surowiecki mentions two early missteps that papers might have been able to monetize. They failed to leverage their local expertise among their audience, moving too slowly to diversify their offerings – think classifieds and listings – and were usurped by the Craigslists of the world. On a larger scale, he points to their refusal to serve as valuable aggregators of news sources, a possible hold over from the past, where you never gave space to your competition.  A tactic that could have driven traffic to their sites.

And while we’re finally witnessing more and different content on these sites that creating richer user experiences, without the bottom line, is this too little, too late?  Surowieki looks toward the future:

There are many possible futures one can imagine for them, from becoming foundation-run nonprofits to relying on reader donations to that old standby the deep-pocketed patron. It’s even possible that a few papers will be able to earn enough money online to make the traditional ad-supported strategy work. But it would not be shocking if, sometime soon, there were big American cities that had no local newspaper; more important, we’re almost sure to see a sharp decline in the volume and variety of content that newspapers collectively produce.

Given the alternative of having our news filtered down through national sources with no local nuances or simply no news at all, we hope the subscription model for online papers isn’t completely broken, but just needs to be rethought.  That being said, we’d be glad to hear your suggestions.   

New Yorker: News You Can Lose