The News is Broke

Quick, name a few things our children will never understand.

Analog clocks? Cursive handwriting (or handwriting altogether)? VCR’s? CD’s? DVD’s? Sub 25/M download speeds?

How about newspapers?

I don’t read newspapers. If there is a worthwhile article in a local paper, I may take a glance.

I get my daily up-to-the-milisecond news all day on the internets via Digg, CNN, Reddit, ESPN, Drudge, and HuffPo, etc etc.

When I wake up, usually before getting out of bed, I skim the New York Times, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal iPhone applications.

I already know everything that will be in the newspapers that day.

We are hearing daily that various newspapers are losing money and going bankrupt (Two more last week), but can we actually envision a world without them? Just because I do not read papers doesn’t mean I want them to fail, here’s why:

In the past ten years, newspapers have been absolutely crushed by a maelstrom of content, none more powerful than the internet and inherently, Craigslist. The best writers and best editors began to flee to the other side of the fence, the internet, thus the quality and morale of every major newspaper in the country decreased.

With a lack of newspaper quality came a lack of journalistic investigation. With the lack of investigation came a reliance on opinion-based punditry and corporate press releases.

Bill Simmons wrote in an article a month ago about how no one noticed Kevin Garnett was hurt saying, “In 1980, Bob Ryan of the Boston Globe would have sniffed out the B.S. signs of this KG story, kept pursuing it, kept writing about it, kept working connections and eventually broken it. True, today’s reporters don’t get the same access Ryan had, but let’s face it: If 1980 Bob Ryan was covering the Celtics right now, ESPN or someone else would lure him away.”

And that’s the bigger problem. Investigative writing for newspapers is dead. All the money left in communications is in opinion.

Peter Abraham, a writer for New York’s Lower Hudson Valley and Yankees blogger, was forced to take a weeklong furlough last week as per his paper’s parent company’s request. Gannett is also the parent company of our local paper, The Democrat and Chronicle, which has also sustained dwindling revenues and exhausting layoffs.

There is a TIME article about 10 papers in danger of bankruptcy within the next year.

So what is the solution?

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch outlined his his vision for digital newspaper delivery yesterday. His idea that news will be all digital is correct. More and more people are using the internet and going all digital is cost effective from a print and paper standpoint and environmentally friendly from the paper saved. All digital news is inevitable.

He also belives people will pay for online news content. There is where I disagree. Even if a paper or news outlet charges users for content viewing, other sites can copy the information, it will be emailed, people will share accounts and passwords, etc. Even the sites that charge for content now can still be found free in other mediums (Like iPhone apps.)

Mark Cuban believes another approach can be utilized saying, “papers should look at anything and everything digital that you can acquire and give away or sell to your subscribers.  It costs you next to nothing to host and allow the downloads, but you are driving traffic, and  immediately offering incremental value that isnt available elsewhere.” Theoretically, with credit card information on file, newspapers could become local Amazon vendors with a bit of creativity and hard work.

Maybe there is no future at all for newspapers. Maybe the folks at 4Chan will be the ones to uncover government conspiracies in the future and not the journalism pros, if there will even be journalism pros.

Maybe the government should bail out the news for American quality of life. Remove the advertisements, ensure story integrity, and make the news a not-for-profity entity. But then again, the socialism folks would never allow it.

And just because internet news is flourishing now, it is not going to last forever. Last quarter saw the first decrease in online advertising spending on record and ad-block use in browsers is growing exponentially. Eventually internet news could go bankrupt too.

The best shot for newspapers is an innovative creation that makes those that desire physical copies of their news willing to continue to pay for it in a digital distribution. Think of a bigger iPhone type tablet screen with newspaper and magazine ‘apps’ that can be bought through iTunes. The paper will update automatically in real time and have multi-touch support for flicking through pages, pinch to zoom, and the ability to save pictures to a drive and email articles. Could it work?