Newspapers and their future

Oh, the pain. Just thinking about newspapers and the challenge they face wants to make you sigh and almost shrug. Like our economy, it's going to be a whole lot worse before it (ever?) gets better.

Principally, this because ... breathe deep here ... there is no business model ... at least not one to sustain current ways of doing things, and that's a key distinction. We have to think about the work of journalism may change in the future — from gatekeeper to gatewatcher, from content creator to content curator — and then we can better explore and predict ways in which the economics might make sense.

Consider some writings in this area ... first, Nicholas Carr lays out the central problem in The Great Unbundling.

“How do we create high quality content in a world where advertisers want to pay by the click, and consumers don’t want to pay at all?”

The answer may turn out to be equally simple: We don’t.

Clay Shirky, a fascinating thinker on all things new media, picks up with this:

We should stop worrying about the newspaper as a whole, and instead turn our attention to the important question: taking unbundling as a given, what bits merit saving? It isn’t the physical fact of newsprint, or the expensive yet ineffective classified ads, or having a movie reviewer in every town.

What’s worth saving, as a critical function, is investigative journalism. We need someone, many someones, to do long, deep, boring research, for stories that may not even pan out. Without that, government at all levels will simply slide back into the nepotism and corruption of the 19th century.

That is the challenge we need to take on, and as Carr notes, it’s not one currently being met well on the Internet.

However, it’s not obvious that the old ways of producing such journalism are better than any possible future ways, both because the current model is far from perfect, and because the Internet brings a suppleness to media design that has barely been flexed yet.

So, we need to experiment ... and fast. The transition will be messy, but new models are emerging that offer some hope. Finally, consider Jeff Jarvis' picture of newspapers in 2020, as well as 10 questions he says news organizations must confront going forward. (Key among them: "Who are we?")

Ultimately, though, the stats are numbingly bad. Time to panic, and for the news industry to actually act like it.