Newspapers: An Endangered Species or an Evolving One?

In the past few weeks, two major dailies ceased to exist in print form. One was The Rocky Mountain News and the other The Seattle Post Intelligencer. The loss of these papers leaves their hometowns with only a single paper to cover local issues. Many other major cities like San Francisco and Detroit, are already in this position, and more cities are likely to join them as local and regional newspapers find it increasingly hard to compete in the world of the 24-hour news cycle and the instant access to breaking news that the Internet provides.

Many fear that the quality of local reporting will suffer as a result, and that the public will find it harder to hold their local officials accountable because they won't really know what is going on in their schools or mayors' offices.
Yet the power of print has faced such doomsaying before and survived, even thrived. Books have not yet been replaced by movies, CDs, videogames, TV, or the Internet, and there are in fact more literate people on the planet in 2009 than at any time in history.

So the market for news is there and growing: the difficulty is how to make room for the news you get on your iPhone and the pleasure of sitting at your local cafe and leafing through pages of newsprint you can hold in your hands.

And more importantly, since newspapers are a business and not a public service, how can they continue to generate enough revenue to survive when so many of us think that just about any content we get off the Internet, we should get for free.

If you take my hometown, Palo Alto, you could say that the newspaper business is thriving. We not only have The Palo Alto Daily News available online and in a paper version, but in the ten years I've lived here, that little paper has been joined by The Daily Post and other variations on the same theme for other local cities. These papers, although a little tabloid-like for my own personal taste, do take on city hall, the local school board, utilities, cable companies. You name the muck; they rake it.

On the other hand, the two major cities I live closest to – San Francisco and San Jose-- have seen their daily newspapers shrivel to a mere shell of their former selves. As Gertrude Stein once said of Oakland, “there's no there there” any more. And both of these papers, The San Francisco Chronicle and The San Jose Mercury News, seem to be caught in a vicious cycle of shrinking ad revenue, shrinking staffs, shrinking content, shrinking readership.

Newspapers need a new business model, and they might find one in the world of non-profits like National Public Radio and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting where your target audience subscribes to content that is ostensibly “free” but at the cost of a nominal membership fee, corporate underwriting, and government subsidy. Surely, if the U.S. government can underwrite the transition to digital TV, it can shell out a little money to keep a free press alive.

A more promising approach is the idea of bundling news content in the same way that database companies have cooperated to provide a whole range of print journals online to public and university libraries. If a user knew that s/he could get the sports page from The Chicago Sun-Times, the editorial page from The New York Times, politics fromThe Washington Post, business reporting from The Wall Street Journal, and local news from their local newspaper, s/he might be willing to ante up for the privilege of getting that information online.

If newspapers were willing to allow users to select a slice of their content and create their own “personal” ideal newspaper, they might find the audience and the advertisers they are looking for.

In any case, newspapers need to think creatively about how to reinvent themselves before they truly become an “endangered” species, and that would leave all of us much poor for the loss.

For other thoughtful commentaries on the possible demise of the newspaper see The New Yorker, and Clay Shirky's "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable."