More free newspapers, plus more ways to pay,
You think papers are dead? You probably think asbestos is banned, too
(Warning: The Portland Daily Sun turned a year old on Wednesday, and that's become a justification for Editor Curtis Robinson to discuss the future of the newspaper industry via his "Usually Reserved" column. For those perhaps slightly less interested in the future of newspapers, we promise a return to regular wisdom next week.)
You walk into your favorite cafe, scooping up a new eScroll tablet from the old rack near the door, and note that it's more flexible than the one you left on your bedside table. These coffeehouses always get the new stuff first because their scrolls are sponsored by media companies.
Glancing at the page, roughly the proportions of the newspaper you're holding now, you tap the lead story and it appears instantly.
It looks and feels kinda like the old print newspapers, but no ink on your hands.
Hey, this is the future and it's easy to figure out; it's the timetable that's difficult — is this cafe visit 10 months away or 10 years?
Clearly, American newspapers are in a transition from news delivered mostly via print-and-deliver to mostly digital delivery into a device. Tablets are the leading suspect for that device of late, but "electronic paper" is a contender and there are other technologies.
Some day, some way, your "newspaper" is going to be mostly digital. That day is not tomorrow.
And the Internet can be a tricky culture.
Back in the '90s, when everyone was getting a website the same way everyone is now getting a Facebook page, it seemed that we were all becoming publishers. Some wild website guy even broke the biggest news story of the decade, that the president was having an affair (actually, Matt Drudge broke a story about the story, but let's not quibble).
There were breathless researchers worried about our addiction to the new "email."
I was there in the early days of click-and-gasp. As content editor for a group of Colorado newspapers, it was my job to convert old-time news into Internet content, a process that mostly involved buying beer for city editors and being mocked to my face.
They were late adapters.
Oh, it was heady stuff. Anyone with a valid Wired Magazine subscription and a tolerance for jargon could be the Guy Who Gets It, which was (and is) the only real qualification for "new media." We built portals, aggregation sites, online shopping centers and became a "search site" before Google monopolized searching ... we changed strategies so much that at Aspen.com the unofficial motto became "for all we know, we're right."
By the end of the decade, we'd created SearchColorado.com, heralded as the best newspaper website in the land by the National Newspaper Association. We were likely the first website to "reverse publish," launching a print product off our website.
God knows how much money we lost or whose it actually was. In the 1990s, the value of your Internet company — and I'm not making this up — was based on how much money you were losing (see the wonderful Michael Wolff book "Burn Rate" for details).
The young Jargon-naughts, as they became known, quickly moved up the corporate ladder, and many media careers built on chasing the next big thing. They are now at the top levels of their organizations, and their core competency is creating excitement for the "next" before somebody figures out that nothing they've ever done actually worked out.
But, that tricky Internet! Just when you think the next big thing is local e-commerce sites, everyone sells online and nobody needs you. Just when the next big thing is elaborate graphics and video, the next big thing becomes a 144-word text. Just when MySpace is the next big thing, Facebook and Twitter and (insert thing I've been too busy to use here).
This is known, but it's worth repeating for the same reasons John Steinbeck outlined his motives in "Travels With Charlie," so "... that newcomers to bumdom, like teen-agers in new-hatched sin, will not think they invented it."
For newspapers, the amazing thing is how quickly industry leaders surrendered ground. After all, the Internet was not the first thing to come along to "kill" newspapers — radio was instant news, and TV was instant news and photos. And, in a way, both of them (like the Internet bloggers now) live largely off the work of newspaper reporters — rare is the broadcast news meeting that doesn't include assigning stories more or less directly from a newspaper.
Some news sites blast bloggers as parasites living off original reporting, but that ignores history. When the morning drive-time radio guys pick up a story and discuss it, sometimes unkindly, that's just verbal "blogging." And reporters secretly love it.
For that matter, it's shocking how many stories that "break" in the national papers have been long-running in hometown sheets.
Look, it's fun to say "you only know newspapers are dead because somebody reported it in the newspaper," but too many of my colleagues are out of work for it to be very funny.
Here's what we call the nut graf: American newspapers outgrew their traditional base during decades of consolidation, both nationally and locally. They became attractive to corporate investors, who packaged them and sold the groups over and over again, transitioning what had been a locally owned, family-managed industry into a horrific mess.
The downsizing we're seeing now has much more to do with that than with the Internet.
So, although I only promised three, here are four trends that are big enough to shape our newspapers over the next five years.
• Going from big to small. News executives, like all executives, got more money power and ego by getting bigger newsrooms and coverage areas. So that's what they did.
Now we are watching them painfully contract, leaving large areas barren. That weekly that was consumed by the growing daily 10 years ago will eventually be replaced, but it will take a while. The "sustainable journalism" movement will help create organic newspapers, and many will be free dailies.
• Local news rules. National and world news has become a commodity (more on that in a moment), and the so-called hyper-local is the only thing left. Many in the industry still think this means the school lunch menu or other "news you can use!" stuff favored by the story-count mafia, but it actually will mean old fashioned news.
Oh, and calendar items and lots of business briefs — because as one of my first editors said, "lots of people should be able to get stuff into the paper, but nobody should be able to keep stuff out."
There's a part of this worth noting, if only for the three or four news colleagues who have made it this far into the column, statehouse news will suffer a bit, but not for long. I know of at least three efforts to create Augusta-based, shared-coverage operations. And in other states there are other models — the Texas Tribune nonprofit model is a prime example.
The reason that the statehouse news will survive the local-local movement is fairly simple – the state governments are going to have more and more to do with local decisions, given budgets and the fact that Congress remains gutless, pushing most hard decisions to the state level.
• Paying for online news. It will be hybrid and it will anger many, but newspapers are going to start charging for some online content, although certainly not all. Google nailed the Internet trend with the motto "make it fast and make it free," but that's because Goog is not a "source creative."
The fact is, commodity information is worthless on the Internet. Charge for coverage of the State of the Union? I'll just click to one of the 1.2 million other stories. What's this about the JFK aircraft carrier coming to Portland? Okay, here's my 10 cents. It will include what's called micropay, but only when it's invisible to the user beyond the initial sign-up.
Like cell phones, there will be plans that allow unlimited reading for a set fee and pay-per-story plans. Some smaller papers are already making money this way, because you can't get their local stories any other way ... any retailer who has competed with Walmart knows this scenario.
Even free newspapers are likely to ask for payment online, offering added value like video or longer stories and relying on the street readership to drive Internet traffic.
• Lots more papers. I know you believe there will be fewer and fewer newspapers. But you likely also believe asbestos is banned in the United States. You have to stop believing every national narrative the mainstream media pushes — or did you think we'd find WMD in Iraq?
Actually, during the transition from print to digital, we're going to see lots more newsprint products, most of them small and many of them free dailies. Just this year, despite the economy, we've seen a half-dozen free daily launches.
To really understand the business model, you have to have launched one of those next-big-thing blog sites, only to see very few unique visits. In the jargon of the day, blogs are opt-in, meaning you have to somehow find them. Free newspapers are the ultimate "push" technology, meaning we simply put them in front of you until you pick one up, and the stuff you find in there can be random. Very random. That's the point — it's kind of the reason we listen to the radio when there's 2,000 songs on our iPod.
Those are the trends that will shape the newspaper landscape.
For the time being, you'll likely read about them on paper — but that new Apple tablet sure is cool.
(Curtis Robinson is founding editor of The Portland Daily Sun.)
