E-Media Tidbits

Giacomo Bassi, Via Flickr (CC license) After the funeral, life moves on.

Last week news industry consultant Vin Crosbie published part 1 of a thoughtful, pointed essay: Transforming American Newspapers. (UPDATE: Part 2 is now available, too.) This is must-read material.

Here's Crosbie's stunning prediction, with which I agree: "More than half of the 1,439 daily newspapers in the U.S. won't exist in print, e-paper, or Web formats by the end of next decade. They will go out of business. The few national dailies... will have diminished but continuing existences via the Web and e-paper, but not in print. The first dailies to expire will be the regional dailies, which have already begun to implode. Those plus a very many smaller dailies, most of whose circulations are steadily evaporating, will decline to levels at which they will no longer be economically viable to publish daily. Further layoffs of staffs by those newspapers' companies cannot avoid this fate -- not so long as daily circulations and readerships continually and increasingly decline."

If you think that's too drastic to possibly come true, read Crosbie's post. He supplies the research to support it.

Online is not the answer, Crosbie contends: "Adding multimedia, convergence, interactivity, Web 2.0, and 'citizen journalism' to what their newspapers have always done aren't cures but merely balms and accessories. ...The absences of multimedia or interactivity aren't why the circulations and readerships of American daily newspapers have been declining in relation to both population and households for more than three decades. Half of American newspapers' declines in weekday circulation and readership relative to population occurred before the Internet opened to the public in late 1991, prior to popular awareness of interactivity or multimedia."

Crosbie highlights two core problems at the downfall of the newspaper business. First, and primarily, that "American newspaper companies have... failed to adapt their core product to a radical change in consumers' supply of news and information during the past 15 years." Secondly, "Too many of those companies have deviated from their local roots."

And in Part 2 he contends: "The problem is that [the newspaper industry's] general-interest product has become obsolete. ...The average supermarket in America contains 45,000 different types of items. However, imagine that you instead walked into a 400-year old market where the clerks hand you and every other customer an identical bag containing exactly the same mix of some 50 items and they tell you it contains what the supermarket's manager thought you and everyone else should or would like to eat. Despite its venerable history, would you shop at this market again?"

So far, I think he's on-target. Except for one thing.

Crosbie also predicted that "the deaths of large numbers of daily newspapers in the U.S. won't cause a new Dark Age but will certainly cause a 'Gray Age' for American journalism during the next decade. Much local and regional news won't see the light of publication." While this is possibly true, I disagree that it's necessarily true.

It seems to me that the nature of news and journalism are transforming. It's not just about the "news business," and definitely not just about "newspapers." It's possible that the era of traditional journalism may be on the wane -- but does that mean that people will do without news or information? As I wrote last week: I don't think so.

I think that people who want news will still get it through other means, possibly less directly, probably more collaboratively. It may not look like what journalists think news "should" look like. It may include a strongly automated, algorithmic component layered with human insight. It may look more like bullet points than stories. It'll probably be strongly focused on mobile and social delivery channels. It may not even call itself journalism. But will it offer people the benefits they currently seek from news orgs? I think it could -- maybe even better, in some cases. And to me, that wouldn't necessarily be a "Gray Age." Just a new chapter.

But I will say this: I agree with Michele McLellan that in light of the current state of the news business, the fact that news organizations plan to send an estimated 15,000 journalists to EACH of the upcoming national political conventions is an unconscionable waste of news resources. I hope the next era of news is more resistant to the herd mentality -- especially when it comes to covering scripted pageantry.

(Thanks to Mark Hamilton for the tip about Crosbie's post.)