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.

General thoughts on future of print newspapers

Earlier this semester, I assumed in this blog that there might not be print newspaper in future, dominated by online newspapers. At that time, I thought I was being too optimistic about online newspapers and too pessimistic about print newspapers. But watching “Epic 2015,” and reading “Maybe it’s Time to Panic” kind of comforted me since I realized that I was not the only one who thought the disappearance of print newspaper could actually happen. (I don’t think it’s going to be anytime soon though)

In “Maybe It’s Time to Panic,” the author said, “daily newspaper circulation has declined every year since 1987.” This is more than 20 years of declining. Earlier this semester, I also assumed that the newspaper industries were probably busier than ever to research the main cause for this in order to revive the print newspapers. But then again, I was wrong. Actually, the newspapers are not doing much research about this problem. They are still busy to do research about this presidential election polls, but don’t do much about “surviving”. There’s got to be elements that only print newspapers can have while online newspapers don’t. I honestly don’t know what these elements could be, but I believe, if newspaper industries keep digging into finding this “unique feature” of print newspapers, maybe they will survive in future. Or at the very least, their readership will decrease by less percent each year.

Tweet me the news

Journalism is still valuable, as well as local (print or online) newspapers. Yes, I do think spelling and grammar are important, and especially for journalism. How would people think the news is credible if the writing is crappy?

The discussion on Monday and also the Maybe it is time to panic made me think other possibilities of online news. In the article "technology doesn't dumb us down. It frees our minds" the author suggested maybe we can blam twitter for making us stupid. And as Nan's really refreshing idea in her post that "media requires less attention may attract more users," a twitter style news might be convenient for people who do not have enough time or attention. 

Actually rss feeds are something similar to twitter style format, but it really depends on what kind of reader (or widget) you are using, the format of the article from the production (news web site maybe) end, and so on. So sometimes the news feeds we end up getting is one headline, or full article. A twitter style means it is short, straightforward, with headline and the blurb text. Nothing else. Maybe something else if the user click on it. But the what shows up on the screen initially should not be more or less than the headline and the blurb text. 

So who will use that? I don't know. But it should not be hard to try this idea. And again, a twitter style does not mean bad writing. It should be the best journalistic writing among all.

will media become more provocative?

I believe this “lack of attention due to information overload” in this century is one of the reasons why TV, movies and advertising are getting more violent and obscene. It makes sense if you look at this issue from media companies. Media are all about getting attention, and I guess they have to do what they have to do to catch up with these “busy people.” But then, what is the boiling point for this attention-begging phenomenon?

People will pay more attention to more violence and obscenity first, but they will eventually get used to it. It’s like the Jerry Springer Show. People got used to seeing so called “freaks” on the show that they don’t consider these “freaks” to be freaks anymore. Back in 1990s, gay people were considered to be extraordinary to put on the Jerry Springer Show, but nowadays, if Jerry puts some random gay couples on the show, it will not draw much attention from viewers. Gay couples in this century are pretty much normalized compared to 10 and 20 years ago. This is why the show is becoming more and more provocative. (I don’t know if "provocative" is the right word choice. I tried to think of an English word to properly describe this.)

So, here is my point of view. If media companies try to get more attention by becoming more provocative every time audience becomes apathetic toward the media’s degree of provocation, would there be some kind of boiling point for this? How far will the definition of “provocation” keep changing over the courses of time?

Adaptation in the age of ADD

The most startling thing about this sessions' reading — chapter 1 from Davenport and Beck's "The Attention Economy" — was to realize that it had been published in 2001. In "digital" years, that might as well have been the dark ages: before ubiquitous cell phones and text messaging; before Facebook and the like; before other Web 2.0 applications that are highly attention-intensive—in short, before our digital lives really became crazy. It's remarkable to realize how taxing all of these daily, almost constant distractions must be on our brains ... but is all of this making us stupid (as Jacie brought up)?

Clearly, we've all become a little more ADD in the way we approach information: We skim, browse, surf, and otherwise gloss over wide expanses of data ... but, then, we have to out of sheer necessity. Perhaps this is rewiring our way of thinking, but it (meaning the digital realm, especially the Web) is also expanding our ability to create, collaborate, connect, explore, co-critique, and expand our understanding. As Jacie pointed out, by allowing us to "forget" certain things that we can always Google later on when we need that piece of information, this should free up more brain space for greater niche knowledge and deeper wells of creative thought. In this sense, as we increasingly learn to manage our everyday information overload, we (theoretically speaking) should be able to adapt such that we can parcel out our attention more effectively—in other words, we're learning how to give less attention to the useless spam (mostly because better filters have improved that dramatically since 2001) and, hypothetically then, we should have more time/attention for the work that matters. Again, we're talking in theory here, since I recognize that we're still so inundated with information that actually carving out quiet space for creative work is getting harder and harder to do.

So, bottom line: The "attention economy" hypothesis put forward here certainly has merit in today's environment, but it doesn't account for the likely improvement, over time, of individuals in the way they manage that scarce attention.

Ah, but at the end of the day, I didn't really get through this article in full ... I just couldn't give it my full attention. ;)

measuring attention?

With so much information and so much to do, we use our own ways and often times we use new technologies help us manage our tasks, time, and attention. Then the debate starts here. There was an article on atlantic.com arguing Google is making us stupid. Guess you know I would not agree with that...... There's counter-argument from nytimes.com, however, saying technology doesn't dumb us down but frees our minds.

I like the second article on nytimes.com a lot more in that it argues we are in an era with so much information that advanced technology helps us save time and spend more time on creating. Similar to what we saw in attention economy, the article from nytimes.com also argued:

In a knowledge-based society in which knowledge is free, attention becomes the valued commodity. Companies compete for eyeballs, that great metric born in the dot-com boom, and vie to create media that are sticky, another great term from this era. We are not paid for our attention span, but rewarded for it with yet more distractions and demands on our time.

It is really interesting to see that a HP scientific calculator was banned in some classrooms in 1972 with the fear that it is detrimental to human intelligence. Well, ban calculators! Ban computers!! Ban SPSS!!

Sorry.... back to attention, thus companies use money to buy attention and users trade in their attention for something else. Attention, compared with cooking pot model, seems to be more concrete in that attention can be transformed into other currency more easily. But even though it seems more concrete, it is still hard to measure. One measurement suggested was time, a poor measurement. How else can attention be measured?

Here's a link to the videos of Poynter's eyetrack method (?).