News-Record.com

FEAR, HOPE AND GLORY:
A meditation on the future of the newspaper business

The forces of darkness aren’t gathering, people. They’re here.

The fact that you’re sitting here shows that you get this on some level, but it’s worth a bit of review. I want you, and the people to whom you report, to understand just how much danger the newspaper industry is in, and by extension how much danger independent local journalism is in.

Daily-newspaper circulation has been dropping by about 1% a year for decades, but in the past couple of years the drop has turned into a plummet. The September 2005 circulation statements found an average 2.6% decline in daily circulation among almost 800 of the largest American papers. The San Francisco Chronicle lost more than 16% of its circulation; the Orlando Sentinel, 14%.

Ad revenue, which is basically what pays our salaries, is flat at best -- and that's just a polite way of saying that it's dropping as a share of total advertising spending. Advertising is moving to the Internet, and we’ve been very slow to follow it.

We’re seeing the aggregated bundle of news and information that we provide being unbundled for us by our competitors. CraigsList eats into our classifieds to the tune of $40 million in one year in the Bay Area alone. Fanatical sports sites are luring our sports-oriented readers from us. Targeted business publications often do a far better job of local business coverage than the business-reporting staff of the local daily newspaper. Expert bloggers in such areas as law and economics are exposing the reporting weaknesses created by our generalist background and mindset. Our business model is disintegrating, and no one yet has a handle on what will replace it -- particularly how accountability journalism, which is what I got into the business to do, will be paid for.

Our credibility -- the basis for about 80% of the market value of a newspaper -- is caught in interlocking fields of political fire. The 35-year campaign by conservatives to make the public believe that mainstream news media are fatally slanted to the left is more powerful than at any previous point. The Torquemadas of right-wing America are demanding, “Confess, liberal!” even as a newly energized, blogger-driven progressive movement attacks corporate media in general, and people like Tim Russert and Chris Matthews in particular, as tools of the White House. (Just so you know I'm not delusional, I do think most journalists are more or less liberal, but on a list of what most directly and powerfully affects the news that people see every day, I don’t think that fact would fall in the top 5.) And politics aside, bloggers of all political stripes, or none at all, are making plain to more and more people the biggest dirty little secret of our business: Accuracy is a lot harder, and a lot less common, than we admit.

Meanwhile, what readers we have retained have a median age of 55 and are paying us the ultimate insult of dying. In the past, they would have been replaced by younger readers who were settling down, buying homes, having kids and establishing roots in the community. That isn’t happening and never will again. The Class of 2006 was born as the Macintosh was being introduced and will be the first to graduate from college having never known life without personal computers as a commonplace. They live their lives online far more than most of us aging Boomers and X-ers can imagine. And to them, print newspapers just aren’t cool.

Some people derive comfort from the industry’s still-respectable profit margins. I don’t. If the industry stays on its current path, those margins will stay strong right up until the day, not terribly long from now, when they collapse entirely, just as Nicolai Ceausescu ruled Romania with an iron fist for decades right up until Christmas of 1989, when he and his wife were summarily executed by their countrymen.

The forces of darkness aren’t gathering. They are lounging around your living room, eating your Doritos, drinking your beer, watching your TV, throwing their empties on your carpet and urinating in your yard. The wolf is not at the door anymore. The wolf has walked into your kitchen, and that unpleasant sensation in your hindquarters is not hemorrhoids.

Why should we care? Yeah, it’s our jobs, but most of us are reasonably smart people whose newspaper experience tends to translate well into a lot of other arenas. What’s really at stake here? Nothing much, really … only independent journalism. And, of course, the greatest political experiment in human history. With all due respect to our Canadian colleagues, for all its faults, and they are many, the United States has done more things right for more people more of the time than any other national government … ever. And a big part of the reason it has is that sometimes when it didn’t want to, journalists were able to shame it into doing so by exposing its failings and shortcomings and negligence, and their consequences.

I love this country. And I love the role that journalism, at its best, plays in allowing us to fulfill some of the promises we made to one another in 1776 and 1787. And I don’t know about you, but I’m not ready to lose either one of those things. Not that I have much of a choice. I’m too young to retire, too old and encumbered with family obligations to just walk away voluntarily and start fresh.

But I’ll tell you something: I suggested at the beginning of this session that you had a choice about whether to bet your newspaper on the things I’m suggesting that we need to do. In fact, I lied: That train has left the station. You’re already betting your newspaper, even if you’re doing nothing – because all that means is that you’re betting on business as usual. And here’s the thing about gambling: The odds always favor the house. Always. The only thing you can control to try to tilt them more in your favor is what you bring to the table: your skills, your mindset, your ability and willingness to give people what they want AND what they don’t yet know they need. I read somewhere once that of all the games you can play at a casino, the odds are least in favor of the house in blackjack. I don't know whether that's true, but if it is it makes sense: That’s the one game in which skill plays the largest role, relative to the luck of the draw, and in which the house has no inherent advantage.

So you can let the house win right away, or you can try to play the game well enough to win, or at least well enough to take enough from your competitors to stay alive. Kris Kristofferson got it backwards: “Nothin’ left to lose” is just another word for freedom – the freedom to do the things that might save us.

Here’s something else to think about. In the movie “The Lion in Winter,” King Henry II of England must face his wife and his three sons. They are pushing him to name a successor, which he does not want to do. There’s a scene in which the three sons are in the dungeon awaiting their execution, and as they think they hear the king approaching, this exchange occurs:

Prince Richard: He's here. He'll get no satisfaction out of me. He isn't going to see me beg.

Prince Geoffrey: My, you chivalric fool ... as if the way one fell down mattered.

Prince Richard: When the fall is all there is, it matters.

Maybe, for us, the fall is all there is. If so, then doesn’t the fall matter?

I’ll be the first to tell you I don’t know for sure whether what we’re trying to do will keep us alive and thriving in the Internet age. As I like to tell people, we might just be occupying the highest point on the Titanic. But here’s the thing, speaking of English kings: I come from two long lines of people who have spent much of the past millennium in desperate, bloody and largely pointless revolt against the English crown. The odds were against them, too, but they didn't care for one simple reason: the alternative to revolt was unacceptable.

The same is true for us: The alternative to a revolution is unacceptable. Business as usual -- cosmetic changes combined with cost-cutting -- hasn’t worked and won't work. What's worse, it has made us look stupid and feel bad about ourselves. We have tried the same old stuff over and over and over, which is the classic definition of insanity. And we have acted like battered spouses, curling up in a ball, whimpering “Please don’t hurt me” to our readers as if it was likely to do any good while the blows continue to fall, each one taking us one inch closer to death. Continuing to do what we've been doing leads only to ignominy and then to oblivion. And to add insult to fatality, it disrespects the knowledge and talents of the very people we say we're trying to serve.

If what the Social Security Administration is currently saying is true, I’ve got 21 years left in this business. I don't intend to spend it curled up in a ball. Neither should you.

We can keep cutting staff to support a profit margin in a business model that will soon be extinct, or we can embrace what the dot-coms found out the hard way a decade ago: Good original content costs money -- way too much money to support a 20% profit margin. (I realize that you don't control the budgets. But you can do two things: You can impress the importance of this fact upon the people who do control budgets -- reminding them that their fiduciary responsibility to keep the company alive outweighs next quarter's bottom line -- and you can foster a revolution by using the budgets you do have differently.) We can keep selling ads basically the way we always have and watch Craigslist and Yahoo and Google suck us dry, or we can better engage with the people whose money we expect to keep us afloat and figure out how we, not Craig, can best serve their needs. We can keep reporting and writing the same dull stories the same dull way, or we can find the stories that people actually want to read and write them, or record them, or animate them in Flash, or shape them in modeling clay, whatever, so that ANYONE can see why we thought the stories were interesting in the first place. We can keep acting as if we have a monopoly on the Truth, or we can invite the people we claim to serve to join with us in a discussion that leads to Truth. We can keep producing a dead-trees product whose production and distribution costs may not even be covered by circulation revenue anymore. Or we can plan a fast but logical transfer of resources to the 'Net and either recreate our print products as daily magazines or specialty publications or just kill them altogether. The New York Times just announced they’re killing their stocks pages? Well, glory hallelujah. Why didn’t they do that 10 freakin’ YEARS ago? (And, for that matter, why do we keep wasting ink and paper on TV listings, sports agate, real-estate transfers?) We can keep apologizing for what we do, cowering when America’s protofascists accuse us of undue liberalism, or we can tell them that holding the powerful accountable is what the Framers of the Constitution intended us to do, it’s liberal only in the sense that John Locke was liberal, AND it probably made their good fortune possible, so if they don’t like it they can get the hell out of America and move to Uzbekistan where people like them can still boil their opponents alive if they want to.

And tell 'em not to let the door hit 'em in the hindquarters on the way out.

In short, we can mark time ‘til retirement or the pink slip, or we can make the fall matter by spending whatever remains of our careers using new and exciting tools to do the things we got into this business to do in the first place: pursue the Truth (now in partnership with our readers), kick ass, take names, raise hell, comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable, help the community tell its stories to itself and have fun. Maybe we still won’t survive; if not, then at least people would know what they were losing. But maybe we’ll beat our competitors at their own game and leave independent local journalism healthier than we found it.

Isn't that what you intended to do all along when you got into this business?

I think we can do that. More than that, I think we will. Join me.