Following up on Mark's post, here are some articles and opinions that I think do a good job of summing up what's happening to newspapers and the mainstream media as a whole. In my opinion, the biggest challenge facing newspapers is the proliferation of advertising/marketing options, and more targeted and cost-efficient options at that (including business' own Web sites). This drives down profit margins for newspapers and has pushed some into losses. Layoffs and furloughs follow. There are other factors, but this is the most significant. A close second: The newspaper has lost an information monopoly. I don't have to buy the paper the next day to get details on the Arizona Diamondbacks game, for example. One doesn't need a press -- or an FCC license, for that matter -- to be part of the press.But I digress. Here are the articles:
This blog post by a colleague, former ASNE president Tim McGuire, looks at how the growth of advertising options powered by the Internet has taken away a newspaper's power to be an "advertising tollgate" in its community. He references a 1995 American Journalism Review article that saw this coming and did a good job of explaining a newspaper's advertising power.
In my comment on Mark's post, I noted that ASNE conducts an annual newsroom employment survey that found daily newspapers shed about 5,900 jobs in 2008, 11.3 percent of the total. Here is the Editor & Publisher story: http://bit.ly/cXkIf. And here's the information, including detailed tables, on ASNE's site: http://bit.ly/6MGG.
I found a lot of telling information during the recent court case over closing the print edition of Gannett's Tucson Citizen, the dwindling afternoon partner in a joint operating agreement (I blogged/tweeted on it here). The most damning assessment of newspapers' current business prospects I've seen lately was in a filing by Gannett and its JOA partner. They had advertisers and ad agency executives explain the competitive situation in Tucson. I posted that section of the court document here, and it's very interesting reading. One prominent car dealer says he noticed no dropoff in traffic when he pulled newspaper advertising during a dispute.
This Networked News essay by Josh Young looks at Google's impact as the "great leveler" in terms of the public getting information and provides links to several helpful posts on challenges facing newspapers and the MSM in general. Jeff Jarvis, whose book "What Would Google Do?" provides the context for Young's post, pulls the issue together in this blog post. Jarvis argues that the article will no longer be the fundamental building block of news because it is a convention of print, while the Web creates an information flow that includes blogs, feeds, wikis, comments and links as well as the news narrative. Jarvis sums it up nicely here:
If we invented news today - and we are - this is how it will look, not because Google replaces paper as the medium but because we are not limited to either.There are other factors at work, of course. Web ads don't provide newspapers nearly what they earn from print ads, readership is splintering with so many choices tailored to communities of interest, lucrative classified advertising is heading to free, Web-based options, the deep recession has put a tough situation on steroids, etc., etc.
This post sums up just some of the articles I've read in the past few days. The thought on this subject is evolving so quickly that I didn't bother to put any articles in your recommended reading. You can get what you need by watching the trades through the links at left.
I take this point to heart from these assessments: It is the business model, not journalism, that's broken. Amid all of the bad news, the market for journalism, if not journalists, is greater than ever. That's why I will argue that the future for aspiring journalists is very exciting. I'm confident that the market for journalists will grow as new models for journalism take root and as traditional news providers develop their digital strategies.
I see signs that journalism will find its way in Politico.com, the nonprofit Voice of San Diego and the Arizona Guardian, a local government-reporting venture established by four laid-off journalists, including one who recently won a Pulitzer for his work with his former employer. Will these three ventures succeed? Probably not all of them, and perhaps not any of them. But these and many other examples show that journalism is searching for new models. I take as a sign this article that says one newspaper is taking steps to prevent employees from ever luring colleagues, even those who are laid off, to local competitors such as Internet startups. And I see signs in the way newspapers are reshaping to become digital centers of infomation, complementing articles with video, interactives, blogs, etc., and often complementing video, interactives, blogs, etc., with articles.
When social media expert Carol Schwalbe talks to us, I'm sure she'll get on me for such a long post. But I wanted to add to Mark's important points as you prepare for your two weeks here.
Posts
"I don't have to buy the paper the next day to get details on the Arizona Diamondbacks game, for example." While I agree that the medium is changing and necessitates adaptation, but this is particular statement is interesting to me in light of how things usually go in my journalism program. I haven't figured out how to get my students to actually cover stories, especially sports. They prefer to sit at their desks and gather information from other sources to write their articles. Because of our small market, our local newspaper covers high school sports thoroughly; therefore, if my students are simply writing a sports brief or filling out a scoreboard, they will often base all of their writing on the reporting of the local paper and accounts from athletes and other students who actually attended the games. Coach quotes are usually gotten as an afterthought in the eleventh hour.
ReplyDeleteIn my class, we literally DO have to buy a newspaper the next day, or we will often be missing sports scores and stats. Yes, the information is available at the newspaper's Web site; however, once it hits the archives, my students have a tough time digging it up, and they prefer the easily accessible newsprint.
I understand that this goes against all things journalistic, but I haven't been able to figure out the magic student/parent/readership/grade formula for getting kids to games unless they are truly interested.