How newspapers can survive

In the traditional sense, newspapers will not survive. I believe that independent journalism will survive, as people like me move to curated content services, and pay for valuable new stories. The way to do this is to combine the kickstarter model and the steam model. Small teams of topical reporters post stories that they want to write and/or pursue, and potential readers bid on them to do so. Then when the content is finished they can distribute it through a global distribution channel, like a Steam for news media content. You can bundle subscriptions from your favorite news teams, get the 'all inclusive package' get the just 'sports and gossip' package, or whatever else works.

Sure a lot of content will seep out there for free, but the kickstarter-like company can add value by explaining to people the importance of funding these teams. As teams get established they can get to a level of continuous funding, or at least for X # of months at a time, that way they can do indepth whistle-blowing type stories, without having to give away what they want to do in the original kickstarter.

I have only just started thinking of this, so I'm sure there are many holes to be worked out. Nevertheless, I do want this industry to 'pivot' into success because I do think they provide an important social good.

The final three paragraphs seemed like a plea for government or government-related funding. That is, for the public to pick up the tab because they do read news (just not from them).

While this can work quite well as part of a general public media body, you rarely expect cutting edge investigative journalism from such public organisations who face their own funding and political justification pressures constantly.

At the end of the day, newspapers are struggling because they have created a model that does not differentiate themselves from anyone else.

This is especially the case when it took something like Wikileaks, which has always considered itself to be as much a journalism organisation as a whistleblowing haven, to show how little newspapers contribute to new knowledge, and if anything are merely tools of others.

The second function of newspapers, as a sort of social bulletin board system is being slowly undermined by new media, however on this front, the more locally-connected papers seem to be faring quite well for now. Though in the end, even these will be unable to catch up to the speed and breadth of updates available via new media, unless they embrace it themselves.

No matter what failings it may have otherwise had, Wikileaks and now others have demonstrated that at core crowdsourced news can be a compelling model, IF you operate a highly trustworthy and ethical platform, for example. That said, nothing can really replace true investigative journalism.

Since I wrote this I just want to clarify that I did not say that newspapers were the only ones in the accountability business; I intentionally said news media, which is a wide swath that also is meant to include certain bloggers and others. Newspapers do NOT have a monopoly on that.

Also, I intentionally did not include 'government related funding' in my mention of what's worth learning from public media's business model. I stressed the role of listeners and the value that public media has been able to gain from developing a reliable and meaningful RELATIONSHIP with listeners. That has taken 40 years to build.

I agree that investigative reporting is a high point and necessary one for journalism, but let's not discount the importance of day in, day out reporting that informs and accurately reflects the life, doings, role, malfeasance of institutions and people of a community. There are some impressive local blogs and sites that do an ambitious job of capturing a pretty full picture of what is going on. My hat's off to them. They need support. Reporting on scandals and forcing out the scoundrels is only one measure of the value of a good news outfit.

Newspaper ownership is a mixed bag; some owners would not know the First Amendment if it bit them. But then there is the McClatchy chain whose DC bureau did some of the most outstanding and aggressive reporting on the lead up to the Iraq War. No one paper or news organization performs well or poorly all the time. But I take the point of one poster here, I think, that a newspaper is only as good as its owners' and leaderships' commitment to independence and the role of an aggressive press.

What is killing a lot of papers -- and my op ed only touches on the mix of factors -- is high production costs, debt and relevance of these brands and forms to audiences with many other choices. The NYTimes HAS an audience, so does the WSJournal. But so does Google and Slashdot and Mashable and Gawker. The news space is crowded with a lot of value for new audiences hungry for the right mix. If you find your news sites valuable to you, then support their business model. What we need are credible, accurate and competitive news businesses.

Thank you all for the thoughtful feedback. This is the sort of debate and discussion I was hoping the oped would generate.

Finally, this crazy notion that journalism is not that hard. It is. Good journalism is very hard, demanding, damning and public. Go to a crime scene at 2AM, or into a courtroom, or try an election night and let's see how good you are at getting the story of what is going on. Only an uninformed cynic would think that ANY profession done well is 'easy.'Take a look at the LV Sun link I included - that investigation into patient deaths and suffering at local hospitals was groundbreaking work. Not at all 'easy.'

-John

Ask yourself: when was the last time the NYT published a story that cause a scandal and forced a politician to retire? A couple of years ago? For it to be worth more than the paper it is printed on, it has to be at least once a week -- there are enough scandales to choose from.

But of course printing filler is cheaper.

They made the news a commodity because it lowered their costs and raised their profit margins. They trained readers to be shallow and emotional, to skim for the high level details and ignore deeper analysis, to be easily swayed by cheap "human interest" reporting. They sold themselves out to national chains and ignored the interests of their community.

And now we are supposed to feel sorry for them?

Newspapers have always been sort of a sham. Propped up by the fact that for centuries it was an enormous challenge just to get any sort of information from beyond the horizon, let alone accurate or timely information. The bar has always been low, and it has always been easiest to skate by on doing little more than repeating what someone else has said but putting it in a nice little easily consumed package (length, writing style, format, etc.) But the barriers to information dissemination have fallen, fast and decisively. And now all of the access, publishing infrastructure, and tricks of the trade that kept the newspapers rich in the past are useless.

In the end it's not a bad thing. There has always been a very profound and wide reaching problem in that journalists have as a rule, and especially toward the last half of the 20th century, been trained in that abstract subject of "journalism". A reporter is a journalist first and then has some specialty as a minor side note to their core competency of generic journalism. The big problem with that is that journalism is not actually that hard. But elevating it to such a high level diminished the importance of "secondary" knowledge in a reporter, such as expertise in the subject they are covering. We've all been witness to the problems this creates. The "science" reporter can barely understand the subject their covering and they routinely make errors which significantly damage the quality of their reporting. That problem has been endemic to journalism for decades.

Journalists who know a lot about the business, how to format a story, how to write a hook to get people interested, but who are as ignorant of the subject matter as a high school sophomore tasked to do a surprise report on a country they've never heard of. Yes there have been exceptions, in rare cases there have been reporters who were experts or who had a strong knowledge of the material they covered, but outside of sports reporting this has always been the exception. Because the difficulty of getting the story out to people in a format that was accessible was primary.

The value of the specialty skill of "journalism" is far, far less important today due to modern communications technology, making the very significant and real short-comings of traditional journalism all the more glaring.

Sorry reporters but I think your days are ultimately numbered. The ideal future I see is one where experts learn how to communicate, not where communicators learn how to fake looking like experts. If you want to be a part of that future I suggest going back to school or otherwise spending a lot of time becoming an expert on something important other than how to arrange letters into a 2 inch wide column.

P.S. Another enormous problem is that the media has become part of the establishment, and has blatantly fallen down on its job to challenge the establishment and report on the key issues of the day instead of merely serving up infotainment and pablum.