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Friday, February 6, 2009
A message from the AJC to its readers…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
OK, not really. It’s just some old-school traveling music to put some soul in your step and some strut in your stuff as we all prepare to head home for the weekend. The weather’s supposed be warm and sunny too….
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What is the future of newspapers?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I just opened a letter from a mayor of a Georgia town that will remain nameless, pleading with me to reverse a recent decision to cease delivery of the AJC to his city on the fringes of metro Atlanta.
“The vast majority of my citizens were dependent upon the AJC for news about our state, the United States and the world,” the mayor writes. The decision has reduced them to traveling to the next city over, “purchasing a single copy of the AJC and then passing it around…. I have even heard a fellow citizen … offer to purchase a used copy of the AJC from someone.”
I don’t know what to say to the mayor. In the first place, the decision to shrink our circulation area was a purely business decision and I had no input into it. Furthermore, I’m sure the business reasons for the decision were overwhelming and that there is no chance whatsoever of it being reversed. The economics of this business have profoundly changed for everybody.
Just this week, for example, News Corp., Rupert Murdoch’s media company and owner of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, announced a net loss of $6.4 billion in the last quarter of 2008. The value of its newspaper holdings alone were written down some $3 billion, and another 25 employees were laid off this week at the Journal.
As a privately held company, Cox Newspapers, the owner of the AJC, doesn’t publicly report its finances, and I’m certainly not in a position to know what our numbers are. But let’s just say that nobody in this business is immune to what’s going on, both in the industry and the overall economy. It has struck newspapers of every size, every editorial philosophy and in every region.
In fact, it’s a global phenomenon. In France, the government is trying to bail out its newspapers with taxpayer subsidies, an approach that would solve nothing and that I personally would oppose here in America. As Scotland’s Sunday Herald reports the French approach, “a package of measures that included the doubling of state advertising in key titles, a free one-year newspaper subscription for every French 18-year-old, and widespread reform of the newspaper distribution and manufacturing process, constitutes the most ambitious plan yet from any western leader to support the ailing print media sector.”
The British press faces the same problems, according to the Herald:
“Earlier this month, the Daily Mail and General Trust sold London’s Evening Standard for the nominal sum of £1. The paper is said to be losing £18m a year…. The extent of the problem, for those still in any doubt, was underlined by communications minister Lord Carter last Thursday, who wrote, in the newly published Digital Britain report, that the “dwindling of the advertising pound” would no longer “underpin content creation”.
So the British too are thinking about gov’t subsidies. Says professor Brian McNair, head of journalism at Strathclyde University:
“Who would have said six months ago that we would be bailing out our banks? We are in unprecedented territory. I don’t see why newspapers should not be considered eligible for state support.”
Again, government-funded newspapers contradict every instinct I have as a journalist. If we can’t find a solution that allows us to survive in some form as a private industry, we ought to go away. But what might that solution be?
First, it’s going to be web-based. At the AJC, we’ve already made the transition to thinking of ourselves as a web operation that also puts out a newspaper, instead of the other way around. If it survives at all longterm, the dead-tree medium will in effect be a niche product.
Some influential voices are beginning to wonder whether some form of Internet payment might be the answer. David Carr at the New York Times cites the example of Apple’s I-Tunes, which has convinced music downloaders to pay for music:
“Remember that when iTunes began, the music industry was being decimated by file sharing. By coming up with an easy user interface and obtaining the cooperation of a broad swath of music companies, Mr. Jobs helped pull the business off the brink. He has been accused of running roughshod over the music labels, which are a fraction of their former size. But they are still in business.
“Those of us who are in the newspaper business could not be blamed for hoping that someone like him comes along and ruins our business as well by pulling the same trick: convincing the millions of interested readers who get their news every day free on newspapers sites that it’s time to pay up.”
Walter Isaacson, writing in Time, suggests something similar. “During the past few months, the crisis in journalism has reached meltdown proportions,” he notes. “It is now possible to contemplate a time when some major cities will no longer have a newspaper and when magazines and network-news operations will employ no more than a handful of reporters.”
And his answer?
“The key to attracting online revenue, I think, is to come up with an iTunes-easy method of micropayment. We need something like digital coins or an E-ZPass digital wallet — a one-click system with a really simple interface that will permit impulse purchases of a newspaper, magazine, article, blog or video for a penny, nickel, dime or whatever the creator chooses to charge.”
“….Under a micropayment system, a newspaper might decide to charge a nickel for an article or a dime for that day’s full edition or $2 for a month’s worth of Web access. Some surfers would balk, but I suspect most would merrily click through if it were cheap and easy enough,” he writes.
Personally, I don’t know what the answer is. I do know that most of the news that feeds the blogosphere is generated first by reporters and editors at old-medium outlets, and that most of the content on radio and TV news shows — both locally and nationally — is also regurgitated from newspaper and magazine reporting.
That model cannot last. Just as the economics no longer allow the AJC to distribute to the mayor’s town, they won’t allow us to distribute work for free on the Internet forever either. And it has impacts that might surprise you. At lunch not too long ago, the local head of a federal law enforcement agency bemoaned what was happening to the newspaper industry.
Journalists serve that agency as an early warning system for public corruption, he said. They keep public servants honest, and they alert law enforcement to possible trouble areas. He worries that we won’t be there to serve that function any longer.
He’s right to worry. However, unless the market finds some way to value that kind of function, it will and should cease.
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Obama is doomed!
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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Doomed, I tell you, doomed!
