News-Record.com

During the monthly staff meeting today, a reporter asked me about the future of printed newspapers. I gave some sort of rambling answer that wasn't satisfactory. I've always said that it's the journalism that matters, not whether it comes on processed wood pulp or pixels or sound waves. I worry about the future of print in that it is our dominant revenue source right now, but I'm confident that we're growing digital $$ in the meantime. There are a lot of bright people out there working on business models that will keep journalism principles alive and healthy.

But anyway, now, I can be specific and quote a futurist when I answer that question.

From Brian Cubbison:

Futurist and columnist Richard Watson has written a book called "Future Files: A History of the Next 50 Years" .

They will disappear about the same time Google does, but will outlive petrol-engined vehicles, free roads, national currencies, the European Union, Microsoft, the middle class, spam and Rocky films.

Of course, also in about the same time frame, he predicts Cher will be gone...as will futurists.

Meanwhile, the World Association of Newspapers asked 22 experts what the newspaper would look like in 2020.

Two excerpts:

Juan Antonio Giner: Innovation believes in the future of newspapers, but the newspapers of the future will be very different, better and more profitable than ever if they embrace change and innovation without losing the core and soul of our business: journalism.

Rob Curley: Newspapers are going to survive. Will we be doing things the way we’ve always done them? Absolutely not. In the United States, there are two types of newspaper publishers -- those who think the most important part of the word newspaper is 'news' and those who think the most important part of that word is 'paper.' ... We can't be afraid of reaching our audience in new ways. It will be one of the keys to our industry’s successful future.

I think print newspaper reading is generational. As long as boomers are such a driving force in society, newspapers will be fine. But there's no question that digital journalism is the future. And we're working on developing our skills there.

Beau Dure used to work at this newspaper back in the '90s, but I know him better through his comments on this blog than I did when he was here. He's smart and insightful as he shows in these comments reproduced at Journalism Hope. With that intro, you probably aren't surprised that I agree with him.

The bottom line: Newspapers could have done everything "right" -- all the suggestions from this list, minus the things never caught on -- and still found themselves in the situation they're in today. The marketplace is fragmenting. Prime-time network TV is losing viewers. Tower Records is gone. Forty years ago, everyone could name a Beatles song; today, most people don't know any of the songs in the Top 10. We simply have too many options....

As the market fragments, traditional newspapers will decline....But there will be opportunities for good journalism....

So we've established niche media while transforming traditional media - perhaps more slowly than intended -- into something new. We've learned a lot along the way from both successes and failures, both small and spectacular.

Despite what you may read on journalism sites and blogs, many of us do understand the market we're in and the skills we need. Our challenge is to move more quickly understand where the audience is, where it is going and how to serve it.

He mentions his experiences and observations commenting on this blog.

I'm as much a fan of the blogging experiments in Greensboro as the next Online-Newser - probably moreso, since I spent four terrific years at the N&R. But judging from the agenda-driven comments on John Robinson's blog, my old editor in Wilmington probably got better feedback in the steam room at the Y than John is getting online.

I don't know about the feedback at the Y -- my experience is that a pretty good place to talk to the audience -- but he has a point about some comments here. Some do go to all the same places -- usually trashing the paper for one sin or another. Really, it's not all that different from conversations I have with people on the street. The criticism in person is usually more polite, but it can also be equally blunt and mean-spirited.

Other conversations are quite robust, helpful and stimulating -- both in person and on the blog. And they make it worth it.

My daughter the younger just asked me if Stephen Colbert's presidential run is serious. This is a child who has been online since she was 10, who reads newspapers only when she's bored, watches TV news less often than that and who seems to know everything about whatever she's interested in, and is now a freshman at UNC.

Of course she knows who Colbert is. She's a bit unsure about who Romney and Thompson are, though. This is also a child of civically engaged parents she saw read the paper every morning and talk politics often.

The Pew Survey described this group early this year: They are somewhat more interested in keeping up with politics and national affairs than were young people a generation ago. Still, only a third say they follow what's going on in government and public affairs "most of the time."

My answer? "Yeah. Absolutely. But I think Jon Stewart is a better candidate."

Monday update: Here's why she asked.

I'm on a panel this afternoon speaking to the 2007 Conference on Public Administration in Chapel Hill. Here's the first sentence of the description of the topic: Saber-tooth tigers, oil, polar ice caps, and newspaper control of news -- all may be gone soon, if not forgotten. So how does a government handle overwhelming demands for information and participation on the new frontier of journalism?

Well. They got the verb tense wrong. "Newspaper control of news" is long gone.TV saw to that years ago. And you can make a strong argument that it never was. But that's another post.

Here is the list of questions the moderator is going to use to spark discussion, although I have no expectation that we'll need more than No. 2 to do that.

1. We have recently seen high profile conflicts between media and politicians/bureaucrats here in North Carolina. Many of these conflicts center around interpretations of the Public Records Laws. Where do you see these laws and their interpretations going in the future?

2. The blogging world has been referred to as the "fifth estate." This implies a certain level of importance in the balance of government branches and citizens. Do you think blogging has such a substantial role, and if so, is it a healthy or unhealthy influence?

3. Bloggers are sometimes accused of being less subject to laws and ethical restrictions than mainstream media, primarily because they do not have assets at risk. Please comment on this perception.

4. What suggestions would you offer government officials for dealing with inaccurate blog postings?

5. There is some pressure for professional government employees to create and maintain blogs. It may be hoped that this would shorten the time lag in government response to the people on issues. Given that the time lag is often the product of a need to review records laws, etc., what advice would you give to appointed government officials regarding this suggestion?

6. Most newspapers and television stations (according to recent reports have added blogs to their repertoire, including The News & Record. How do you see this merger affecting news coverage?

7. What are the implications, professionally and ethically, of government employees posting information to blogs? Given the ability to make such postings anonymous, an option generally not available in letters to the editor, what impacts might their ability to share inside information have? Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

8. How do you see the speed and anonymity of web-based news ultimately affecting the democratic process?

Most of these questions are the wrong ones, it seems to me, coming at the topic from the wrong angle. As the world of news and information moves from the one-to-many model of mass communication to the two-way model of the Web, then hand-wringing about whether that move is good is irrelevant. It simply is.

I wrote about my initial talking points here. Now that I have the questions, anything else I should add?

The need for greater transparency in government will be a key addition. What I've learned is that when people aren't given full and complete information, they often fill in the blanks on their own, creating a version of reality based on some facts, some assumptions and some biases. It has little to do with "new forms of media," which is the title of the panel. People have always done that. The difference now is that the people have a voice of their own on the Web. As with everything else, some of the voices will be cranky, mean-spirited and off-point. Others will be relevant, insightful and helpful. It is what it is.

What else?

Could Greensboro citizens have gotten potable water from Randleman Reservoir by now to serve us during this drought? Experts say no, but newly elected City Council member Trudy Wade campaigned that city incompetence is the reason we're not drawing Randleman water from our taps.

Allen Johnson dissects her campaign talk and matches it with facts and political reality.

Defeated incumbent Sandy Carmany wishes that Allen had written his column before last week's election. (Taft Wireback did write an article last month about why water wasn't coming from Randleman Reservoir.)

But imagine this unfolding another way, a way that portends the future:

On her blog, Trudy Wade posts her position on the use of Randleman water. Sandy responds with her own position. Allen Williams of the city water department explains the technical process of getting water from a clean lake into homes. Tom Phillips, the city's elected representative on the water authority, explains the political process on getting all the government bodies to agree on the use of the water. Arnold Koonce tells us about High Point's position. Others -- regular people like you and I -- read, ask questions, offer suggestions and learn from following the discussion of experts with information.

Allen's column did some of this, but it is restrained by the one-to-many delivery form which is delivered fresh once a day. Imagine this discussion done in real time in public.

We aren't there, of course. It would require more people to be online, more people with the direct knowledge to graduate from lurkers to contributors. And finally, either fewer trolls or participants with thick skins. (I first thought that it would require candidates who were seeking the best, correct solutions, but they are the least necessary. It is enough that citizens are informed. Presumably they would see through candidates who aren't acting in their best interests.)

Aside from the information citizens would get, but they also would be able to get to know the candidates in a way they couldn't in the newspaper or in television sound bites. You could see how candidates communicate, how they express themselves, whether they deal with the facts, and how open they are to other opinions.

Coincidentally, Dan Gillmor writes a column in the Boston Globe with a similar approach to political debates.

A debate that would unfold online over the course of days, or even weeks and months. Imagine that one candidate takes a position and poses a question. The opponent would answer with a written response of some predetermined length, but with the help of staff, experts, and the general public. Then the first candidate, again with the help of anyone who wants to join the process, would dissect the response and reply with (we'd hope) a truly nuanced update. Continue this process at length -- and repeat it with many other topics.

He recommends it be moderated, and he's probably right.

I doubt enough Greensboro citizens use online this way for this to take off yet. Greensboro public decisionmakers may not be ready for this yet. We certainly missed an opportunity during this municipal election season.

Still, there's nothing preventing us, the newspaper, from taking an issue, recruiting knowledgeable participants to actively contribute, and building an informed discussion that would help make good public policy.

What do you think? You must believe that this, or something like it, is the future. Let's get ahead of the curve.

Maybe a beat reporter could do a way better job if there was a "live" social network connected to the beat, made up of people who know the territory the beat covers, and want the reporting on that beat to be better.

That's Jay Rosen's brilliantly simple idea.

It feels like the future to me.

I wanted us to give it a shot. I'm frustrated and disappointed that we're not on the bus with the 13 participants. We tried. Not surprisingly, Jay was receptive and helpful to us. We just couldn't find the right combination of reporter and beat. We looked at health and medicine, at High Point and at Raleigh, but for various reasons, couldn't make it work by Jay's deadline.

A major issue for us is that we are playing a bit of musical chairs as reporters leave and others move from beat to beat. But that will settle out soon enough.

I'm hopeful that we try this on our own, watching Beatblogging.org from afar and learning as we go. I'm convinced that it would give us an edge in our reporting, improve the reporter and make us a better newspaper. I have in mind a couple other possibilities once the right people get into place. Jay said it's possible that we could join his initiative mid-stream.

So that's two innovation initiatives before us. It should be a busy next several months.

...about the way things are.

Rex Smith of the Albany Times-Union explains why the paper isn't identifying the 24-year-old woman on the lap of a former U.S. representative when he was stopped for DWI. The editor almost taunts readers with the info he knows and they don't, and then invites them to use google.

James Vesely of the Seattle Times calls e-commerce the anti-newspaper because it takes money normally given to newsrooms.

Both show a poignancy for times gone by. Both seem are disappointed by things today. Both, I suspect, are really not liking the way the future looks.

(Both via Romenesko.)

Inspired by Ryan Sholin's post at Invisible Inkling, in which he is wearying of the "business of chasing after curmudgeons with a laptop in my hand, shouting 'But you got it all wrong!'" I want to pose the question in a different way.

Isn't it time that we just let the curmudgeons go, treating them as if they are the equivalent of newspaper trolls?

Hardly a day passes without Romenesko linking to someone bemoaning the loss of the good old days, how dumb newspaper owners are and how stupid the audience is? I grant you things were easier when we had more money and more control. But were they better for readers? No. Could we tell our stories in new, helpful ways? No.

Unless you're looking at history to learn for the future, you're wasting your time. Move on. Complaining about the present won't bring the past back.

WIth apologies to Seth Godin, who inspired this post:

I often get asked by budding journalists how to break into the business. Here is my newest best advice: Don't.

The business is too tough. Do something else. Seriously. Go into PR. Go to grad school. You must be good at something else. Figure out what it is and do it.

It is interesting -- not funny, not amusing -- to read about the big papers adopting practices of smaller papers.

Jack Shafer at Slate writes about some changes in the editing process at The Washington Post: Removing layers of editing. Allowing flexibility in determining who edits stories and when. Creating collaboration among assignment editors, copy editors and photo and designers. Earlier decision-making. Wider spans of control. (Via Romenesko.)

As the market changes, the economy slumps and traditional news operations contract, such changes are mandatory. Smaller papers like us moved in this direction several years ago. Smaller papers than us have always operated this way because they have to.

To some extent, the changes follow the Innovator's Dilemma idea that good is good enough for many newspaper readers. Why edit a story four times when twice is good enough?

They work because communication and collaboration are simpler in small organizations. In the smallest of papers, everyone does everything. Editors also report and design. Reporters also take photos and edit. Everyone helps in the production. Collaboration is vital, and silos are impossible to erect. I know because I've worked at such newspapers. As the organization grows, it attracts and nurtures specialists.

And as it contracts, it becomes important to increase the span of control and to reduce the number of hands and eyes that touch the story or photo. Writing and editing for the Web throughout the day is the obvious course. Next comes reducing the geographic coverage area and tightly focusing coverage topics.

I've written about the number of editors before and won't repeat it. Our blogs aren't edited precisely because we want a voice of authority and a conversational style to come through. (Shafer's allusion to reporters who can't write used to be true; we have employed plenty of people who were great reporters and poor writers. Some years ago, we realized that we could no longer afford that luxury and that we needed to choose good reporters who could write their way out of a paper bag. Please withhold your comments about this writer.)

What I suspect is that the big papers are struggling to find the right balance between "feet on the street" and the receivers -- editors and designers. We are, too.

If the future of news is free, then why charge $20 to see its past?

That's what I was thinking when I read that it will cost a double sawbuck to visit the Newseum when it opens in Washington next month.

That could be a problem. I like history, I like museums and I love the news business. But in a city filled with history and museums -- am I going to visit one devoted to the history of news? Particularly when the Smithsonian is free? And if they aren't going to get someone like me....

The Newseum's VP says it's not aimed at me, which is probably good: "Our mission is helping the public understand how important a free press is to a functioning democracy," says Paul Sparrow.

I understand the importance of a free press. I just wish so many media organizations had not spent $435 million to do it. I know we're a self-absorbed lot, but doesn't this feel over the top?

At a time when the newspaper industry is in distress -- and newspaper companies paid big money to support the Newseum -- I question the priorities.

There's no reason that journalism shouldn't have a museum all its own. There are sure a lot of less important topics with their own museums. (Don't make fun of the Gopher Hole Museum, either.)

Understanding the past is fine, but it is the future that most of us are interested in understanding.

Update: Mark Potts smartly weighs in with more questions.

On Friday, I was interviewed by a journalism student working for ASNE Reporter, the newspaper that will cover the upcoming American Society of Newspaper Editors' convention in Washington. His story assignment: Will newspapers survive? What can be done to save them?

This assignment saddened me. Are we really still asking that question?

Yes, newspapers will survive, although not flourish or endure. I'm thinking that newspapers are good until the baby boomers start dying out in 30 years. I base this on Phil Meyer's generational research. Who knows what they'll be like, but it's safe to say that papers will be smaller, more focused and more niched. And many of them won't publish every day. Some options here.

But these are really the wrong questions, I told him. (Even though they are being discussed elsewhere by people smarter than I.) The more interesting question the editors should be thinking about is whether and how professional journalism will survive and flourish.

I'm think it will. Part of that is my heart talking, I admit. But I believe it with my head, too. Our challenge is to make sure that what create has value and that we can get it before the eyeballs of those who value it. And there are a lot of innovators working on that.

James Maroney, publisher of the Dallas Morning News: If you are I the newspaper business, you are in the business of managing decline. If you are in the news and information business, then you have a healthy future.

The news business is undergoing a transformation that's occurring faster than many of us thought. Our mistake is thinking of it as a threat rather than as the greatest opportunity journalism has ever had. There will be a living there if we can figure out how to be the discoverers.

Fortunately, the ASNE conference schedule seems to focus on change and digital journalism. Not that I'm going to be there.

A friend expressed disappointment that I did not attend the Gene Roberts speech at the Friends of the Library event at UNCG last week. My response surprised and, I suspect, disappointed him even more: "I have heard enough retired editors talk about the good old days and how we should fix newspapers to last a lifetime."

I meant no disrespect to Roberts, one of the three or four most significant newspaper editors of the past 50 years. He has one heckuva story and deserves all the honors he gets. He was here to talk about his book with Hank Klibanoff, The Race Beat, which I have read and admire. Not only are there good journalism stories in it, but there are good hero stories in it. But I read and talk with retired editors and reporters who describe the solution to newspaper problems as a return to the good old days when the daily paper was the only game in town.

Isn't it pretty to think so?

From what I hear, Roberts also bemoaned the contraction of newsrooms and of international reporting. I agree. How can you not? Doubling the size of reporting staffs would certainly serve the community. The more journalists reporting the good, the bad and the ugly, the better.

But those are the effects of problems facing newspapers not the cause. While good journalism has not changed markedly since the 1990s, technology has. So has the audience. So have people's habits. Not addressing those changes in discussions about journalism and newspapers is like talking about television as if there were still only three channels.

Those changes:
* the economic distress faced by traditional newspaper advertisers such as department stores
* the loss of classifieds revenues
* the splintering of the attentions and interests of the audience
* the ability to get news and information from thousands of other places and in dozens of other ways
* the sluggishness with which newspapers have anticipated the future (now present) and the sluggishness of their response

These won't be fixed by reducing the profit margin or going back to the journalistic world of the 1980s and 90s. They will be addressed by innovation, peering around corners and going to where the people are. And producing great journalism.

Steve Yelvington uses a telling, humbling anecdote from a trip to Thailand to make the same point: We can sit and bemoan the passing of the era of the great metropolitan newspaper or we can choose to look for ways to invent the future. I think journalism will be changed, but it's going to survive.

I would go further. By inventing the future, journalism will be stronger. It just won't be entirely in newspaper form.

Sunday update: Related from Doug Fisher.

In one way this a dark day in media.

* Newspaper circulation, generally speaking, continues to decline.
* The News & Observer is offering voluntary buyouts to about 25% of its employees.
* The Wall Street Journal continues its shift from national business paper to national paper.
* Another newspaper, The Capital Times in Madison, Wisc., closes its 6-day-a-week print edition. (Saturday, actually.)

I suppose industry evolution sometimes looks that way.

Yet, it's also a day of hope, as The Capital Times goes online. Not to those in Madison who were laid off, of course, but to the rest of us ink-stained wretches interested in the future of journalism. It will be a tough evolution -- and it will have to make adjustments faster than we normally think of evolution. Competition is stiff, niches are nearly filled, the marketplace is unforgiving and readers are saturated with information. (That is best described by Jay Rosen.) But it could well become a laboratory for journalistic innovation. Newspapers still developing a Web presence -- and who isn't -- will be watching.

It is a grand and noble strategy to continue to bring its voice and values to the Madison community. I hope it works.

Mark Binker gets his hand slapped by Clinton press folks for acting like a citizen of the United States -- going to the Clinton fund-raiser along with 700 people yesterday and then writing about it.

I have resisted, until now, pointing out the fact that there were 700 people in that venue, 95 percent of who were toting cell phones with cameras and recorders, a bunch with personal cameras and all, I would think, with decent enough memories to relate the event to friends and neighbors. So since everyone invited to the event was potentially a reporter, that "closed press" thing seemed pretty laughable.

I think it has been suggested before that the Clintons are working under a 20th century media mentality which is no longer operable in the age of citizen journalism. Yesterday was an up-close taste of that.