"Newspapers are the wave of the future," I once argued in a column. It was a bold and somewhat odd statement to make coming from a young journalist who loves the Internet and doesn’t subscribe to a newspaper. But I was in denial. I didn't want newspapers to die. And I still don't.
When I read that
51 million people still buy a newspaper and 124 million read one on an average day in the U.S., I get hopeful about the fact that newspapers have some life in them, even if it's slowly fading. Just because they're not the wave of the future doesn't mean they're not an important part of the changing tides.
As we search for new strategies and business models, it won’t do us any good to complain about the demise of newspapers. It's no secret that this is a trying time for journalists who face layoffs, pay cuts, long hours and little pay.
But it’s also a time of opportunity, a time to stop saying, “Newspapers are dying. Newspapers don’t stand a chance against the Internet. Newspapers are a thing of the past.” If newspapers are a thing of the past, that's all the more reason they should be an integral part of the future.
Just look at the
Pulitzer prizes to see how newspapers have
helped shape journalism's past in the area of public service, editorial
cartoons, commentary, photography and investigative, explanatory, beat,
national and international reporting.
Instead of discouraging our young people from becoming journalists, why not encourage them to enter the profession and make changes to an industry that needs young minds to keep it fresh and innovative? It’s today’s young journalists who can remind us that our profession isn't dying. It's evolving.
The Web is crucial to the future of news, but it's not the whole story. Newspapers are a part of the story, too. They don't belong in the lead, but they are part of the story's body, providing us with the background information we need to figure out what has and hasn't worked in journalism's past as we look toward what will work in the future.
This is the
era of Web 2.0. In 1844, it was the
telegraph, and then the
telephone and modern
typewriter in 1870s. By 1924, the
radio had come into play, followed by the slow transition to television news in the 1940s. Newspapers were threatened by these new media and they changed, but they survived.
Efforts to Guide the Future of NewsWhile some newspapers are struggling to survive, innovations are thriving. News organizations and journalistic futurists are talking a lot about what newspapers might look like, or evolve into, in the next 10 to 20 years.
Many are considering how to marry newspapers with new models rather than divorcing them. They’re taking risks by experimenting and restructuring their newsrooms, while looking to the newspaper as a model of what has and has not worked in the past, as a framework for the future. Some associations are even doling out money to encourage innovative thinking.
The Knight News Challenge, funded by the Knight Foundation, plans to invest $25 million or more throughout a five-year period in the search for community news experiments.
This year's top winners include Chris Csikszentmihalyi, Mitchell Resnick and Henry Jenkins, who were awarded $5 million to create a Center for Future Civic Media. Adrian Holovaty was awarded $1.1 million to create, test and release open-source software that would help people living in a large city learn more about their neighborhoods.
On a smaller scale,
The Southern Newspaper Publishers Association (SNPA) just offered Tim O’Briant, news director of the Aiken (S.C.) Standard, a $2,000 cash prize for his entry in the SNPA’s “Prototype Newspaper of the Future” contest. Sixty-nine journalism students, reporters, editors, etc. submitted their prototypes for what they thought the newspaper might look like in 2017.
Contestants were asked to think about how to nurture, sustain or reinvent newspapers. O’Briant proposed
a prototype that would involve newspapers removing their content from the Internet and switching to a satellite-based communications network that requires subscriber access.
Lawrence McConnell, publisher of
The (Charlottesville, Va.,) Daily Progress and a member of SNPA’s readership committee, headed up the contest.
“The notion that newspapers are somehow trapped in a time warp here is really incorrect,” McConnell said in a phone interview. “The question confronting news going forward is, how does the revolution continue? How is it going to unfold? To a large extent, I think that newspapers are in control of their own destiny.”
O’Briant, McConnell points out, is just one of many journalists who are crafting ideas for business models that will work. Just this week, the
Imagining the Future of Newspapers blog launched. Last month, the
World Association of Newspapers asked
22 industry leaders, Internet pioneers, futurists, scholars and other media experts to share their thoughts as to what newspapers might look like in 2020 as part of WAN’s
Shaping of the Newspaper project.
Moritz Wuttke, CEO
of APAC
Publicitas in China, focuses more on technology, saying, "The printed
newspaper will get smaller and become mostly free. New technology and
combination probably with mobile phones will make even the printed
newspaper much more interactive than today."
Rob Curley, vice president for product development,
Washington Post/
Newsweek Interactive, argues: "Newspapers are going to survive. Will we be doing things the way we’ve always done them? Absolutely not. We can’t be afraid of reaching our audience in new ways. It will be one of the keys to our industry’s successful future."
Hopeful about What’s to Come When digital doomsayers and negative newsies talk about the death of newspapers, I look for stories about revival in the renaissance age of news.
One of my favorites comes from Dan Gillmor, director of the
Center for Citizen Media.
There's never been a better time, I tell students, to be a journalistic entrepreneur -- to invent your own job, to become part of the generation that figures out how to produce and, yes, sell the journalism we desperately need as a society and as citizens of a shrinking planet.
[...] Try to ignore the fringes of this conversation: the old-guard doomsayers and/or elitists who see nothing but woe for journalism, and the tech-triumphalists and/or media haters who can't wait to see today's system blown to utter shreds. These are vapid, false choices. Let's work to keep the best of traditional media.
From a journalism standpoint, it doesn't make sense to shun a model that has been an integral part of the foundations of journalism. Instead, it makes more sense to keep learning from it -- to find out what worked, what didn't, and what needs to change so that we can help shape a better future for news, as we continue moving away from paper toward the Web. No, newspapers aren't the future of journalism, but they're reminders of the fundamental principles and practices of our profession. They're our inky, bulky blueprints for what's to come.
[How do you think newspapers will be a part of the future, if at all?]
