What's so great about daily print newspapers?
As readers of the blog know, I am loosely involved in a group that is discussing the future of journalism in Seattle (and in general).
I'm also listening this morning to KIRO, who have David Horsey and Art Thiel in a discussion primarily focused on the demise of the Seattle P-I.
They keep talking about how foundational newspapers are, yadda yadda yadda, and I can't help but wonder... what's really so great about daily print journalism?
A 1939 Robert Heinlein quote comes to mind:
IMO, the writing has been on the wall for print newspapers for quite some time and was merely brought to a head by the current economic climate.
All this argy-bargy about daily print newspapers seems to be rather pointless. So what am I missing? What's so great about daily print newspapers? Why shouldn't they go under in the current economy?
I'm also listening this morning to KIRO, who have David Horsey and Art Thiel in a discussion primarily focused on the demise of the Seattle P-I.
They keep talking about how foundational newspapers are, yadda yadda yadda, and I can't help but wonder... what's really so great about daily print journalism?
A 1939 Robert Heinlein quote comes to mind:
Horse-drawn carriages, roll-based player pianos, pinball machines, daily print newspapers... they all filled a need in their time, but technology and society continues to advance. It seems to me that those in the print journalism business have a choice: evolve or die.Robert Heinlein wrote:There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.
IMO, the writing has been on the wall for print newspapers for quite some time and was merely brought to a head by the current economic climate.
All this argy-bargy about daily print newspapers seems to be rather pointless. So what am I missing? What's so great about daily print newspapers? Why shouldn't they go under in the current economy?
Comments
Yeah, there are online puzzles, and yeah, newspaper management had their heads in the sand for years, but it's an ethereal thing rather than a practical thing. I could live without a newspaper and probably will. I just don't want to.
I'm not saying that this is my opinion -- this is just the wonk perspective, to which I've had some exposure.
Yep. Switching to online newspapers assumes that everyone has an internet connection, which is most decidedly not the case. I've heard numbers (I think it was a Houston paper) that still had 1/3 of its readers that didn't have Internet connections. If they switched to all digital access, which would save them a ton in printing costs, they'd lose 1/3 of their readership. And the readers they'd lose would have less access to news in general, since the newspaper was the cheapest mechanism.
So I have to agree strongly with Civil Servant and Lake Hills Renter.
Newspapers have a lot of information, much more so than what you can get from watching television. So if 1/3 of the people out there don't have internet access and get their info from the newspapers, by letting newspapers die we are sitting by idly as the dumbing down of America accelerates.
I know, there's a lot of stupid stuff in the newspapers, but even more on television.
And the internet? That's a colossal warehouse filled with stupid stuff.
In the move away from print newspapers, for example, we are losing the whole business model that was able to cross-subsidize and fund reporting and content that might not have been able to sustain itself otherwsie. In the new digital mediums, everything has to justify it's existence on it's own right, not by being a part of something else.
So much for all the great articles that Playboy used to publish, now that pornographic officionados can go directly to the pictures on-line and ignore silly stories that just get in the way of their purile pleasure.
Likewise, the decline of the newspaper also means the end of much investigative reporting.
We have already seen how technology publications have HUGELY cut back on in-depth product reviews as their business models have collapsed. It is getting increasingly difficult to find unbiased 3rd party reviews for many items, unless they are posted by a consumer themselves, which is hit and miss.
These things are just going to be the dustbin of history.
Can't people without internet access at home just go to the local library or public university and access the internet for free?
Last I checked, free is cheaper than the $0.75 per day newsstand price of a print paper. And both methods require some effort on the part of the person that can't afford internet access.
If we're talking about people with home delivery of the newspaper, that's about a $20/month cost, compared to dial-up internet services @ $10-$15 a month or high-speed at $30 a month.
In other words, I don't get the "if daily print newspapers disappeared, poor people wouldn't have access to news" argument. Perhaps someone can explain it further for me.
Dropping from 2 newspapers to 1 is not that significant anymore with all the other points of view that are now available online. Dropping from 1 to 0 would be a bigger problem, but we aren't there yet.
It would be great if someone found a way turn a profit from investigative reporting. I think the potential for doing that through an online payment mechanism is more likely that just sticking with print.
The issue Sniglet raises is a good one though. Even if newspapers can survive by going fully online, their newly straitened budgets and need to seek efficiences won't allow for a lot of investigative journalism, except perhaps quickie hit pieces. Stuff like this? [http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,919328,00.html] Forget it.
1) Help get a fire going in a fireplace
2) Burn it to keep my hands warm in a "tent city" scenario
3) Read wherever I want (e.g. camping)
4) Keep physical historical records of events (in case the electricity/batteries ever disappear for more than a couple of days)
5) Clip coupons/ads and take them with me to the store
6) Grab it to read on the airplane/bus/etc.
More importantly, with independent and unique printed news media in every town/city of America it is almost impossible for any agency to grab complete control of the news media. However, if all physical newspapers are eliminted, online news sites could end up like "TV news" in that all news is "fed" to them. Saying goodby to printed media is one step closer to total centralization/control. Not a good situtation.
Imagine the future where all print media has long disappeared (everything is now via the internet) and suddenly civilization is thrown back to the stone age and people have to "start over". There will be no electricity, no batteries, but thank God we have all these "how to" books on farming, building, teaching, etc......that is, if they still exist.
Lead acid batteries are pretty robust, and electricity is just a reclaimed alternator and crank away. In such a scenario, which would be more valuable: books on how things used to be or tapping into an ad-hoc 802.11 network to find out what is really going on?
And what if there isn't a local library or university? Many/Most rural towns don't have them, yet still get the city paper. Does Eatonville have a library? Darrington? I'd be surprised if they do. Certainly not a college. Not everyone is as young, urban and tech-centered as some on this blog/forum.
I think newspapers aren't as useless as some seem to believe, particularly to those that have fewer avenues for news. That said, it's about economics, and if the papers can't find a valid revenue stream they will (and should) fall. I just don't necessarily see that as all good, or even that nothing is being lost.
Craigslist gave out for free that which newspapers have had a monopoly on for centuries and that's classified advertising.
Advertising for real estate in print for instance has become wholly ineffective over the last 2-3 years because of this. No one looks for houses in the Times and P-I anymore. Everyone looks online. Either from listings your agent sends you or on windermere.com, themlsonline.com, redfin or craigslist. Almost no one looks in the Times or the little nickel for houses anymore.
For me, I haven't bought a printed newspaper for well over a year. I get all of my news online from about 6-8 different sources, local and national. With internet access, it's far easier I think to find news and different takes on the same story.
Ultimately it does come down to a question of economics. And so the question is, do we want the government bailing out the press? Do we really want state run media?
I mean, sure it's sad to see the newspaper go away. There were I'm sure alot of horse breeders that went out of business as cars became more and more popular.
Print media will likely never completely disappear. However, like television to radio, so the internet is to print media and news. And for that matter, so the internet is to television as well.
Side note, does losing one of our daily newspapers make us more, or less of a world-class city?
On a more serious note, I agree with LHR. Not everybody has easy access to a library. It doesn't even have to be rural. Do you know how many buses you might have to take to get to a library in L.A.? If you had a car and drove...your gas cost would be more than $0.75.
But then again, I'm a pinball fan that has never owned a video game console in my life.
Anybody up for a game of "Captain Fantastic"?
Right. When I buy a newspaper or a magazine, it's because the content therein is worth something to me. When I can read almost anything I want online for free, I feel like I'm getting away with something, and I see that the economic model is unsustainable.
But I am made richer by everything I read, the very stuff that is currently supported by the unsustainable model. When the model breaks, I'm going to take a major lifestyle hit and I'm also going to become stupider. I don't see the horse-breeder comparison as being particularly apt -- there, the breeders suffered economically but the former customers of the breeders, now in cars, could go farther faster without having to get wet or end up smelling like an animal, which represented a net social and economic gain. Also, the horse breeders would only have had to learn a new skill to get by. If print newspapers die, the loss is institutional.
Most people in their 60's and older don't use the internet, so it doesn't really matter if there's a library on every corner with 25 internet terminals if people don't know how to get online.
Does having only one newspaper make Seattle less of a world class city?
Yes, if that newspaper is the Seattle Times. Not that there's anything World Class about the P-I...
I'm one of those people who is really rankled with the term " World Class".
A great city is one with diversity, racially, economically, and culturally, and that would range from opera to old grizzled guys in bars downing bottles of Mickey's Big mouth...but when I think of people who push the term " World Class' i think of people who want to rid the city of poor folks and folks less literate than themselves, and envision a city full of sculpture parks and opera and symphony and poetry readings, and people braying about native plants and how proud they are that plastic bags are going to be banned.
You can have your world class.
I heard these "blog" things are catching on
Hypocrisy check: Posters on this site piss and moan about how bad the "MSM" is all day in their reporting about the economy, the housing boom, etc. The Seattle Times and PI are painted as being in the hip pocket of the "REIC".
Now I read this thread and posters are bitching about how it's the end of world that the PI is going out of business
My $0.02: the PI sucks. It was always second rate even for Seattle. And printing newspapers is a ridiculous waste when you can distribute news electronically. No paper, no printing, no distribution, no waste. Seems like a fine idea to me.
Oh, and poor people don't subscribe to the paper.
Exactly why the "class divide" argument doesn't make any sense to me.
If every newspaper in the world immediately eliminated all print distribution, very few people would suffer much from lack of news. Even ignoring online news, cable TV provides 24-7 news, over-the-air TV provides a couple hours of local news a day, many radio stations are essentially 24-7 news and others like NPR produce regular news segments on under-reported topics. And don't forget that people talk to each other. I don't have to read every meaningful story, because people who are more interested in it than I am share it with me.
On the other hand, if all the papers truly shut down, we face a real threat of reduced variety of news. If there were only 3 papers in the country, it's easy to imagine a situation (like on TV) where one is ultra-left, one is ultra-right, and the paper that tries to use journalistic integrity is unable to actually cover everything that needs covering. Investigative report is especially time consuming and often the most important news we have.
Enough about the demise. In the future, most of all your biggest concerns will be eliminated by technology. E-paper, like what the Kindle and Sony Reader use will progress to the point where you can read a years worth of news stories on a single AA battery. Downloads will become seamless enough that even a disabled elderly will be comfortable with pushing the "Update News" button on his 'paper' (given to him by the Seattle Times of course, but with a 75 cents per diem charge) and within second he'll have the entire days news downloaded over the cell lines without even realizing that he knows how to use a computer (albeit a specialized one).
Think it's impossible? The elderly know how to use microwaves, and every microwave in production has little computers inside. What the 65+ crowd doesn't like are WIMPY computers with Windows interfaces that they find non-intuitive. This is obviously a problem that can/will be resolved.
Podcast between writers Bill Simmons and Chuck Klosterman. Partly focused on sports writing, but mostly what they feel about the reasons behind the "death" of newspapers.
"Seattle Real Estate Professionals" to stay online at the new Seattle PI
Well that's one bullet dodged. Otherwise, they might all have ended up here. Imagine Seattle Bubble filled with people who used to make a living off real estate!