Summary: The
Economist says the future of newspapers is not bright. But, the magazine
says the decline of newspapers won't be as harmful to society as some fear.
The future of newspapers
Who killed the newspaper?
Aug 24th 2006
From The Economist print edition
The most useful bit of the media is disappearing. A
cause for concern, but not for panic
“A GOOD newspaper, I suppose, is a nation
talking to itself,” mused Arthur Miller in 1961. A decade later, two reporters
from the Washington Post wrote a series of articles that brought down President
Nixon and the status of print journalism soared. At their best, newspapers hold
governments and companies to account. They usually set the news agenda for the
rest of the media. But in the rich world newspapers are now an endangered
species. The business of selling words to readers and selling readers to
advertisers, which has sustained their role in society, is falling apart (see
article).
Of all the “old” media, newspapers have the most to lose from the internet.
Circulation has been falling in America, western Europe, Latin America,
Australia and New Zealand for decades (elsewhere, sales are rising). But in the
past few years the web has hastened the decline. In his book “The Vanishing
Newspaper”, Philip Meyer calculates that the first quarter of 2043 will be the
moment when newsprint dies in America as the last exhausted reader tosses aside
the last crumpled edition. That sort of extrapolation would have produced a
harrumph from a Beaverbrook or a Hearst, but even the most cynical news baron
could not dismiss the way that ever more young people are getting their news
online. Britons aged between 15 and 24 say they spend almost 30% less time
reading national newspapers once they start using the web.
Up to a podcast, Lord Copper?
Advertising is following readers out of the door. The rush is almost unseemly,
largely because the internet is a seductive medium that supposedly matches
buyers with sellers and proves to advertisers that their money is well spent.
Classified ads, in particular, are quickly shifting online. Rupert Murdoch, the
Beaverbrook of our age, once described them as the industry's rivers of
gold—but, as he said last year, “Sometimes rivers dry up.” In Switzerland and
the Netherlands newspapers have lost half their classified advertising to the
internet.
Newspapers have not yet started to shut down in large numbers, but it is only a
matter of time. Over the next few decades half the rich world's general papers
may fold. Jobs are already disappearing. According to the Newspaper Association
of America, the number of people employed in the industry fell by 18% between
1990 and 2004. Tumbling shares of listed newspaper firms have prompted fury from
investors. In 2005 a group of shareholders in Knight Ridder, the owner of
several big American dailies, got the firm to sell its papers and thus end a
114-year history. This year Morgan Stanley, an investment bank, attacked the New
York Times Company, the most august journalistic institution of all, because its
share price had fallen by nearly half in four years.
Having ignored reality for years, newspapers are at last doing something. In
order to cut costs, they are already spending less on journalism. Many are also
trying to attract younger readers by shifting the mix of their stories towards
entertainment, lifestyle and subjects that may seem more relevant to people's
daily lives than international affairs and politics are. They are trying to
create new businesses on- and offline. And they are investing in free daily
papers, which do not use up any of their meager editorial resources on
uncovering political corruption or corporate fraud. So far, this fit of activity
looks unlikely to save many of them. Even if it does, it bodes ill for the
public role of the Fourth Estate.
Getting away with murder
In the future, as newspapers fade and change, will politicians therefore burgle
their opponents' offices with impunity, and corporate villains whoop as they
trample over their victims? Journalism schools and think-tanks, especially in
America, are worried about the effect of a crumbling Fourth Estate. Are today's
news organisations “up to the task of sustaining the informed citizenry on which
democracy depends?” asked a recent report about newspapers from the Carnegie
Corporation of New York, a charitable research foundation.
Nobody should relish the demise of once-great titles. But the decline of
newspapers will not be as harmful to society as some fear. Democracy, remember,
has already survived the huge television-led decline in circulation since the
1950s. It has survived as readers have shunned papers and papers have shunned
what was in stuffier times thought of as serious news. And it will surely
survive the decline to come.
That is partly because a few titles that invest in the kind of investigative
stories which often benefit society the most are in a good position to survive,
as long as their owners do a competent job of adjusting to changing
circumstances. Publications like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal
should be able to put up the price of their journalism to compensate for
advertising revenues lost to the internet—especially as they cater to a more
global readership. As with many industries, it is those in the middle—neither
highbrow, nor entertainingly populist—that are likeliest to fall by the wayside.
The usefulness of the press goes much wider than investigating abuses or even
spreading general news; it lies in holding governments to account—trying them in
the court of public opinion. The internet has expanded this court. Anyone
looking for information has never been better equipped. People no longer have to
trust a handful of national papers or, worse, their local city paper.
News-aggregation sites such as Google News draw together sources from around the
world. The website of Britain's Guardian now has nearly half as many readers in
America as it does at home.
In addition, a new force of “citizen” journalists and bloggers is itching to
hold politicians to account. The web has opened the closed world of professional
editors and reporters to anyone with a keyboard and an internet connection.
Several companies have been chastened by amateur postings—of flames erupting
from Dell's laptops or of cable-TV repairmen asleep on the sofa. Each blogger is
capable of bias and slander, but, taken as a group, bloggers offer the searcher
after truth boundless material to chew over. Of course, the internet panders to
closed minds; but so has much of the press.
For hard-news reporting—as opposed to comment—the results of net journalism have
admittedly been limited. Most bloggers operate from their armchairs, not the
frontline, and citizen journalists tend to stick to local matters. But it is
still early days. New online models will spring up as papers retreat. One
non-profit group, NewAssignment.Net, plans to combine the work of amateurs and
professionals to produce investigative stories on the internet. Aptly, $10,000
of cash for the project has come from Craig Newmark, of Craigslist, a group of
free classified-advertisement websites that has probably done more than anything
to destroy newspapers' income.
In future, argues Carnegie, some high-quality journalism will also be backed by
non-profit organisations. Already, a few respected news organisations sustain
themselves that way—including the Guardian, the Christian Science Monitor and
National Public Radio. An elite group of serious newspapers available everywhere
online, independent journalism backed by charities, thousands of fired-up
bloggers and well-informed citizen journalists: there is every sign that Arthur
Miller's national conversation will be louder than ever.