Change or Die

Traditional news outlets perform an incredibly important job in American society. The internet reduced the capacity of these institutions to control the story, but they still have a role. As the ‘State of Journalism’ report shows, American newspapers still do most of the journalistic news gathering and community journalism – while growing – is not yet robust enough to replace print. To insure citizens get as much unbiased, thoroughly reported information as possible, newspapers must stay solvent and active.

But how to do this? Revenues are down because of the recession, but print ad revenues have been declining for ten years or more. Subscription rates also began declining before the recession, evidence that things will not fully return back to ‘the way they were’ even when the economy turns around. What is more likely is that revenue has been permanently reduced for newspapers because of the unprecedented reduction of distribution cost, coupled with the increase in networking power and processing speed on the internet. Some newspapers, sensing this new reality, try to do ‘more with less.’ Instead of a more efficient workforce, they get a more stressed out newsroom that produces thinner, lower quality print product that they then try to re-produce online. Younger online users are left unengaged and old-time newspaper customers who remember the ‘hey-day’ keep on canceling subscriptions.

The online trend of “Free everything” cannot be fought.  The current trend of declining profits – whether slow or fast – will continue unless newspapers change the business model. The biggest, most inefficient  expenditure – the one that will keep newspapers at a financial disadvantage with the web – is creating a daily print product. Gigantic printing presses, ink, electricity, transportation and carriers all have to be factored in daily. Contrast that to the web, which eliminates almost all of those expenses. Though there is real reverence for the print product at newspapers, the bottom line is that many of them cannot maintain the journalistic standards and staffing required to do good work and maintain the print product on a daily basis. Instead, newspapers should consider making the print product a thick, weekly, maybe even more ‘upscale’ product (like a graphic novel of news.) This would still keep the older audience around and save a huge amount of money. And to the concerns that older people will not move online for news? The fastest growing audience on Facebook is  and over. If there is content they want, older people will go online to get it.