Hired by Sam Zell to find innovative ways to market Tribune’s newspapers, and for the moment, Abrams is among the more controversial actors in the drama of American newspapers at the start of the new century. Regardless of what you think of Abrams and his ideas, there is a more fundamental question to consider: What is Abrams selling? Indeed, what are newspapers around the country selling these days?
Every few weeks, it seems, we read about another daily “transforming” itself, searching for a formula that will compel people to read it and, hopefully, go spend a lot of time on its Web site. These overhauls are often accompanied by a memo from the editor that explains how the changes are designed to help the newsroom “do more with less.”
That’s because the reality beneath the rhetoric is grim: fewer reporters, shorter stories, smaller newsholes, less institutional memory, more sections with titles like “Fun & Games” (The Sacramento Bee), and more Web features devoted to celebrities (Los Angeles Times). “Hyperlocalism,” which tends to have pride of place in these memos, has become the go-to strategy—last recourse?—for newspapers whose ambitions are rapidly contracting.
A broad newsroom survey, released in July by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, suggests that newspapers are becoming “niche” publications—and based on the evidence in that survey, and some of those “transformation” memos, that niche isn’t just local, but also softer and more superficial. Slate’s Jack Shafer recently observed that newspapers are losing their role as the central purveyors of information-as-social currency to the Internet. He’s right, and to us this underscores the idea that offering readers a collection of cocktail-party nuggets and some good recipes and travel tips is precisely the wrong strategy. The newspaper industry needs a good salesman, but it also needs some courageous thinking about what it’s selling. The fear-driven approaches emerging in many newsrooms today are not the answer.
Part of the solution may lie in the evolution of new ownership models that break newspapers free from the likes of Sam Zell, who has made it clear that public-service journalism is not a priority; but part of the answer—as well as part of the problem—can be found in an ethnographic study commissioned by The Associated Press and released in June, which chronicled the news-consumption habits of eighteen young adults around the world. What the study showed was that these millennials tend to skim along on a superficial diet of headlines, isolated facts, and brief updates, often digested while checking e-mail or otherwise multitasking. That’s the bad news. The good news is that the study subjects claimed to be frustrated by the paltry fruits of their grazing: “Participants . . . show signs of shallow and erratic news consumption; however the study also suggested that people wanted more depth and were trying to find it.”
It’s tempting to say, “Well, put down your damn BlackBerry, log off Facebook, and read a book (on the Kindle, if you want), or an investigative series (online, if you’d like).” Information increasingly comes to us with little effort, and this may breed a passivity that further undermines the idea that it takes some work to be well informed. “Going for depth,” the AP study concluded, “necessitated more attention to the activity than these subjects tended to give it.”
But rather than blame the reader, what if newspapers—if they are destined to be niche reads—took those young readers at their word and claimed the depth-and-knowledge niche and sold that? Despite their diminished resources, they could still dominate the field. Such a niche could even fit with a hyperlocal approach. Lee Abrams strikes us as an enthusiastic salesman—we’d love to see what he could do with a product that readers both want and need.
To avoid the familiar circling in a big circle--perhaps to square it--some concrete steps should be risked. One, it is absurd that so many journalists are so poor at tactile journalism. If you ask a journalist to compare a TOEFL or an SAT manual with an advanced COBUILD grammar or the Longman Language Activator so as to try to figure out how we could stop burning through hundreds of billions of dollars a year, at least, on factitious teaching and testing in the world, something strange happens. The journalist does not normally pick up the books and ask questions about them. The journalist just gapes. Some are phobic: Try getting some "education" reporters to read even an eight-line poem. "The Sick Rose."
Two, how can we still be in the age of information incoherence, even at the 9/11 anniversary? At Language Log, the world's best Linguistics blog so far as I am aware, there is a discussion ongoing about the shallowness of some members of the press as exhibited in the coverage of a SpinSpotter. But CJR and Language Log, The New York Times and Harvard University, may as well be as distinct as Saturn and Central Park. The information just does not flow. CJR itself has to practise information coherence at the highest levels.
Three, how is it possible that those managing schools of foreign service, political science departments, and social sciences programs generally, do not know how to teach students how to internalize a powerful print media cycle? A good high school cycle for students in the northeast would be The New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal. The idea is to practise an intensely tactile cycle on this best format for learning how to collate information, the broadsheet print newspaper. "Internalizing the cycle" would mean that after a few months you could assimilate the papers in about two hours, spot patterns, and extract the full cognitive growth value from the exercise. If you tell me that there is an American high school where this coherence project is being done, I will prove to you that you are wrong. If not incoherent.
Distraction is the "now" and "with it" fatal disease that will make you stumble over "pigs" and "lipstick" because you will be so language insensitive. Harvard language insensitive. Hardly could there have been a worse catastrophe in political rhetoric since Nixon conceded he was a crook. Sir Peter at TLS is working this lipstick thing for all it is worth, for whatever he expects to get out of it. Maybe a double Sir.
The message of the future is to stop being generic and get down to some serious work. Words are not actions. Cease to pass the fake bills, the words that say on their very face, "I am just going through the motions." I got it from SpinSpotter.
I concur; it's time to get down to some serious work. Newspaper editors should stop wringing their hands over the dire predictions of doom and gloom and get back to doing what they do best: identifying, exploring and amplifying the public policy issues at the local, state and national levels.
I'm talking about bread and butter issues, of course. But I'm also talking about quality of life issues as well.
Don't assume that the policy wonks and the officeholders get it; most don't. Start by knowing and understanding the problems in your community (and by community, I don't mean artificial political or geographic boundaries) Then dig deeper to unroot the causes and the consequences of doing something about or ignoring the problems. Explain how each issue fits into their lives and livelihoods. Offer suggestions and top them off with passionate editorials that encourage or admonish readers and leaders.
By helping readers to learn and ultimately to care more about these issues, you will also enable them to form and express their values.
Ultimately, these individual voices will merge into community values, which then can be used to set and shape a common agenda for elected representatives to work from.
There is no other single source in any community that is better equipped or positioned to this than the newspaper.
The problem for newspapers is not going to be solved by changing content or style. The problem is one of technology and economics.
The trans-Atlantic passenger ship was a great way to get to Europe until the Boeing 707 went into service in 1960. Within six years all those proud ocean liners were either scrapped or turned into cruise ships.
It's not that stretching out on a deck chair in the fresh air isn't better than sitting in an aluminum tube breathing the same air as 200 other people, it's just that once the people for whom cost and speed and frequency were more important than comfort and style were lost, there weren't enough left to pay the cost of operating a Queen Elizabeth.
The internet is killing newspapers for two reasons. First because it's a faster and cheaper way to get news and information. And second, because it's broken the monopoly that newspapers used to have on local advertising.
Until recently newspapers had an effective monopoly on local advertising -- classified ads, supermarket, department store, auto dealer and real estate broker display ads.
Newspaper owners had that effective monopoly because it was so expensive to start a competing metro daily. This allowed them to make annual profits of 20 and 30 percent. The good ones took part of that profit and used it to create strong news organizations that could deliver quality journalism (and make their monopoly even more secure).
All that changed with the internet, which not only is a cheaper and faster way for people to get the news but also a more efficient way for many advertisers to reach prospective buyers.
As the newspaper monopoly on local news and advertising inevitably disappears, so to do the 20 and 30 percent profits and the option of maintaining expensive well-staffed news organizations.
We've headed for Web economics, where the cost of entering the fray is minimal -- think bloggers -- and the ideal is free content, preferably supplied by the audience, as in YouTube, Facebook or eBay. There's no place for the traditional costly high-minded news organization in this model.
So that's the tragedy. It would take another post to explore what might emerge in the place of newspapers as we know them. I hope it's not just cruise ships.
Thanks to G.B. for coming up with the metaphor I've been searching for.....the newspaper as ocean liner.
I'll resist the impulse to extend that metaphor. But if I did it would have something to do with an entity that had grandeur and power and purpose, accomplanied by a fatal inability to change course quickly enough to save itself.
The media whoare are blessed, in their minds eye, forever powerful....Who died and left the media all lknowing, all seeing, etc.
OK, you have the "mike" and the pipeline to miillions of "minds eye" viewers. Your power is now absolutePOWER - yes, now curruptive and more important more corosive.
This isn't about journalism. It's about our moral compass, no longer part of culture, often redefined as "pop" cultural...make all unside down.
This from an ex-con, an Experiential Social Philosopher, more at
http://www.beyondpuke.com
I'm not a journalist, but I do read a lot of newspapers -- all of them online, and all of them free. My take on these issues is what I feel when someone asks me to _pay_ for content. It's anachronistic; it's so the 90's; and I won't have it. I just go to the next paper which will give me the info for free.
Yet, having read many different newspapers, I always return to the quality news. The fluff, the bad reporting, the boring and/or faulty linguistics/logic, the flabby lead. These do nothing for me, and I don't return.
To give an extreme example: every morning I read the NYTimes.com. I something interesting is happening in politics, I'll jump to the WashPost. The Times is consistently interesting and (typically) reliable. The Post is good 1 our of ten times, in my mind. The writing isn't as clean nor clear, and the stories I have often heard of before they hit their press, some times days or weeks before. Hence, NYT gets my hits often, WaPo occasionally.
Or, another example: WSJ charges for most content. I balk. I visit Bloomberg, which isn't as good, but it's free. For business press, I find that Bloomberg will give me names dates and basic occurrences, which I then google to find out more from primary sources. Still, Bloomberg gets my hits, and thus more cash.
This is the aim for helping the public. Get the high quality, make it free, and then seek advertisers for the web. Or, go the PBS model, and once a year ask (though less incessantly) for donations to keep the paper going. I won't pay for a subscription, but I'd donate a few bucks if I like the copy.
One last thought from a consumer: the online ads should be tasteful, non-intrusive, and engaging. On Slate, I often will click their ads because they intrigue me -- what exactly is this oil company lying about helping teachers teach??? I click to see what snake oil they have proffered, and Slate gets a bit of cash. I'd think that a separate page of ads could be a viable way to get more money (and clicks) on a site.
So, to sum up, go with the internet as your key source of funds. Your first job is to make sure that people understand that newspapers are businesses, and without money, they go broke. The first time people start to look for news, and there isn't any, people will beg for their return.
JJ