Fight the Future
Joseph Epstein asks, “Are newspapers doomed?”
To begin with familiar facts, statistics on readership have been pointing downward, significantly downward, for some time now. Four-fifths of Americans once read newspapers; today, apparently fewer than half do. Among adults, in the decade 1990-2000, daily readership fell from 52.6 percent to 37.5 percent. Among the young, things are much worse: in one study, only 19 percent of those between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four reported consulting a daily paper, and only 9 percent trusted the information purveyed there; a mere 8 percent found newspapers helpful, while 4 percent thought them entertaining.
As we know them now, certainly. And that prediction has little (but not nothing) to do with media bias. Mostly, newspapers are doomed by technological change. Papers which embrace the new technologies (The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal come to mind) will remain in existence, albeit in new forms.
The rest had better hop on board or prepare for doom.
(Hat tip, Mike Daley.)
These are the killers:
and only 9 percent trusted the information purveyed there; a mere 8 percent found newspapers helpful,
…why should I pay good money for untrustworthy or useless information? I can get as much of that as I can stand online.
The big surprise for me is that slightly more than a third of adults still bother with the things.
There are only two reasons why I bother with taking the newspaper: comics and sports (basically baseball). Those are the important sections I read at breakfast; looking at them on the computer screen just isn’t the same first thing in the morning. I do glance at the local headlines, and some of the ad inserts on Sunday can be helpful. Overall though, I don’t get my news from the newspaper.
In the future, most newspapers will be mostly local content only with a few supra-regional papers like the NYT & WaPo still covering not-so-important national and general-interest international stories. Papers will shrink in size and staff, generally, though the rise of the electronic versions will offset this a bit.
Also, you won’t “subscribe” to your local paper: it’ll be free.
However, if you want all the good, interesting news you won’t find in your local daily, you’ll have to subscribe to any of the pay-only news outlets that run international operations: and you’ll subscribe based on your internal political scheme so as to find a news outlet that panders to your belief system.
The end of pretend “unbiased” journalism is coming, to be replaced by advocacy journalism.
For the past year or so, I’ve found that on the few days when I sit down and actually read the newspaper, that I’m left with the feeling that it’s full of everything so “yesterday”. Nothing is new. And beyond the widespread bias, there is such a lack of depth in everything they do, that I just have a hard time going back. The influence of USAToday is everywhere.
Not having a deep interest in sports, and mostly past reading the comics, I’m finding that my newspaper subscription amounts to little more than a delivery service for my daily Sudoko puzzle.
I think there is one area where local papers can survive: in depth production and SOUND analysis of data.
For example; in Boston the Globe has been providing more and more statistics recently on a variety of issues (crime, real estate pricing, school budgets). While their “analysis” is weak the data is productive and useful both in the near term and for historic purposes.
In this regard (if they strive to be scrupulously fair, unique in their subjects and distinctively rigorous)they could create a variety of databases that would be useful to all kinds of economic and social researchers.
Unfortunately, I’m not sure the Globe will publish statistics they find which wound their liberal agenda too much but other papers could be successful if they became percieved as professional grade managers and distributors of statistical products.
OT:
Stephen, I know it’s not Friday, but An Englishman’s Castle posted recipes for whale:
http://www.anenglishmanscastle.com/archives/002318.html
For azlibertarian, it’s the daily sudoku, for my wife, it’s the weekly coupons. I swear, if consumable manufacturers can find another way to deliver her her weekly coupons, the one paper we buy a week (Sunday) will go by the boards.
It will be much more difficult to beat my dog with a rolled up computer.
well the reason, I no longer buy a paper is MEDIA BIAS. in kansas city, we have a knight ridder paper “the kansas city star” and it is so bias and slanted that you would think i lived in new york, new york. this is the bible belt and we are much much conservative than the editorial staff of the star. they will not get a penny of my money until they become more fair. oh i still read the paper, from coworkers or get on the star website – but again not a penny of my money to pay for their leftwing, filtered news.
If you want a daily sudoku, there’s the Daily Sudoku website:
http://www.dailysudoku.co.uk/sudoku/index.shtml
“I swear, if consumable manufacturers can find another way to deliver her her weekly coupons, the one paper we buy a week (Sunday) will go by the boards.”
They’re working on it…
First generation is those frequent shopper cards and I present it religously. Actually received coupon for Guinness once!
I used to read the Gazette every morning until we got a new paperboy who was unable to get the paper delivered before I had to leave for work. It’s bad enough to be reading already old news without adding another 10 hours to the mold. We canceled weekday delivery and only get it on weekends. Except last Saturday we didn’t get it at all – it was delivered on Sunday morning with that day’s paper.
And they call that news? We’re considering dropping it altogether and all things considered, the Gazette is a fairly conservative paper.
Jon,
Ha! : )
Growing up in the 60′s we would receive two daily papers plus one or two weeklies and I usually read or glanced through them all. Now I get one paper seven days a week. I’m probably older than most of your readers (49), but I will not give up reading a newspaper until they stop printing it. There is something about holding a newspaper in my hands and having time to absorb what it says that I enjoy. I don’t want to sit in front of a computer screen to read it. I usually read all the sections (first, city, sports, entertainment, business) if I have time. National news, state news, city news, business news, comics, advice columns, sports stories and columns, I read them all.
Seeing photos on paper rather than on the screen is visually more appealing; I don’t want to have to waste my color ink to print them out, and it takes too long.
I also like having the coupons on Sunday; I don’t want to go to a bunch of web sites to download and print them.
So, I am probably in the minority, but long live the newspaper!
Although I agree on the whole with the analysis I think it needs to rethought when talking about local and sub-regional papers that might allow them to survive. Papers like the Hartford Courant have fairly stable numbers because they deliver local news and local sports. They also provide a reasonable entertainment section with a nice selection of cartoons, good bridge column, good chess problems, etc, etc, etc. Except for the comentary, the first section is a waste of time. But I think a local paper could survive in the short term, at least, by delivering good local news and sports. ANd the Courant has a reasonable web site that is apparently generating income through advertising (which is worth me looking at as I can download and print valuable LOCAL coupons). So I find both the dead tree version and the online version valuable. The coupons more than pay for the subscription (I can even get coupons for store generics, a break on the cheap stuff).
Pravda by the Lake (Chic Trib) used that 1 on me to try and resubscribe.
The coupons.
Save a tree, don’t subscribe.
One thing that never gets talked about in these discussions is the Associated Press. There’s no national newsgathering agency with a fraction of the reach and resources of the AP, all of which are paid for by the local newspapers (and TV and radio) which are members. And there’s no Internet model which could begin to either replace the AP, or to pay for it.
Although the AP occasionally gets tarred for bias, the huge majority of its product is simple, by the book facts and information.
I’d argue that it’s simply irreplaceable, and, to judge by the comments on the utility of newspapers that I’ve seen here and elsewhere, utterly doomed.
When people say they can get their news over the Internet instead of from a local paper, they’re right, depending on how much they care about what’s going on in their community. But without the AP, where will their news come from? Reuters? UPI? The New York Times?
I’m older than Dustin, but I wouldn’t buy the newspaper even if the local grocery chains didn’t participate in the weekly flyer-by-mail distribution.