A Silver Lining in the Newspaper Crisis

If you're a regular reader of blogs like this one, you might have concluded there's nothing positive to say about the current state of the newspaper industry.

So it's striking just how much good news there is to be found in a major study released today by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. PEJ's researchers surveyed editors at hundreds of dailies for the report, "The Changing Newsroom: What Is Being Gained and What Is Being Lost in America's Daily Newspapers?"

To be sure, all the gloom and doom is in there -- the mass buyouts and layoffs, the shrinking newsholes, the plunging ad revenues. But despite all that -- or maybe because of it -- newspapers are getting smarter, more creative and more efficient, both objectively and in the view of the people who run them.

With the overwhelming majority of papers having downsized their newsrooms (85 percent of big papers and 52 percent of papers with circulations under 100,000), some editorial retrenchment is a given -- as is some hand-wringing over that retrenchment. But papers aren't going about it willy-nilly, nor are they sacrificing expensive prestige journalism in favor of the reader- and advertiser-friendly stuff that pays the bills.

Rather, they're very sensibly shifting their resources away from areas where their efforts can easily be duplicated and into the sorts of coverage where they can best distinguish themselves from competitors in all media. For most papers, that means not trying to compete with The New York Times, the Associated Press, et al on national and international news, and instead beefing up the state and local news desks. Why spend thousands of dollars a month to put one more reporter on the Obama press plane in hopes of catching a campaign aide in a gaffe when the same reporter could be digging around at City Hall for something truly exclusive? This is what Huffington Post CEO Betsy Morgan was talking about when she predicted that the newspapers of the future would survive by eliminating "journalists whose job it is to rewrite an AP story."

Without a doubt, closing foreign bureaus and keeping reporters close to home will take a toll on the depth and sophistication of the portrait of the world newspapers are able to paint for their readers. But it's not as though the areas where they're consolidating their resources -- education, crime, the environment -- are worthless.

It's especially heartening to see how many editors say their papers are doing more investigative work than they were a few years ago -- and doing it better, thanks to the same phenomenon that has rendered their papers' national and foreign reporting increasingly irrelevant: the internet. Data-mining has become an indispensable tool in the enterprise team's kit, allowing them to break stories they never would have attempted a generation ago. No wonder, according to PEJ, editors are describing their staffs as feeling energized and filled with competitive fire.

The web also seems to be having a salutary effect on newspaper writing. Despite the shrinking of newsholes, story counts are actually up as editors impose greater discipline on inch-counts and relegate B-matter to the website, where interested readers can easily find it. Those who prefer shorter stories have more to choose from and less filler to wade through.

Which brings up perhaps the most interesting point. In a recent article for The Nation, Eric Alterman predicted that newspaper subscribers, detecting the drop in editorial quality brought about by shrinking newsrooms, would cancel their subscriptions en masse. In fact, that analysis could hardly be further from the truth. Often, the first offerings to go in the face of cost-cutting are those with the least journalistic value -- TV listings, stock tables, crossword puzzles. And those are the changes that elicit reader complaints and subscription cancellations, concludes PEJ, while the cuts to national and international reporting go all but unnoticed by consumers.

In other words, far from keeping newspapers honest, readers are standing in the way of a necessary and beneficial evolution.

Comments

[exnews]

Written like a true "suit". The only thing newspapers have done is shift their resources to advertising. Now more than ever, you have to go through a maze of ads just to find a few lines of actual content. Put a fork in them, they've simply become spammers in print.

[JohnPseudonym]

The reason I don't read print is because there is nothing to read!

Content please!

I get far better info for free and it's more up to date.

If you want to save a paper, make it worth more than the 50 cents it costs to buy it...

My local paper is nothing more than an outlet for 60's leftovers to vent their leftist views.

I don't mind listening to all opinions, but hearing the same thing from one side for 20 years is a little tiring.

[Relayer10]

As a 26 year newspaper advertising manager....both family owned and publicly traded corporations...

The problems usually lie in two areas. Publicly traded companies are primarily motivated by profit margins. Historically, the margins have been 40%. In the more recent past those margins were near 30%. Now, newspapers are hoping for something near 20%. How many businesses out there would call a 20% profit margin BAD? Publicly traded companies put pressure on local publishers to deliver that margin...no matter what they have to do to achieve it. A great many publishers fear their own jobs first, and have NO long term plan or vision at the local level. This means simply "cut", without regard to what those cuts mean in the future....a future that can be as close as the next quarter.
Family owned newspapers tend to take the content and the long term outlook very seriously. Profit margins are just as rich as the others. They tend to cut in a very different way, and usually are hesitant to cut at all.

The second area is advertising. The main reason newspapers are in the state they are now in is due to shortsighted corporate demands of the last 8 years or so. As the internet began to rise, corporations refused to execute more customer friendly pricing, and realize the need for integration of the web. When the opportunity came to capture the revenues from local customers, they priced themselves out of reach for medium to smaller sized local customers. They refused to invest in the web in a meaningful way to bring the power of the web to those same customers.

Consequently, those local customers began to drift to other mediums. Now, when the newspaper needs those locals, they are not available to them. Many newspapers have resorted to selling space at firesale prices to prop up weak days or months. What was a rare "deal" is now so common as to make published rates only a reference point. This is also the fault of local publishers, and corporate directives. Instead of moving toward the local advertiser, the shortsighted greed of the early part of this decade carried forward until the bottom began to fall out in 2006. Most advertising executives were pointing this out as early as 2004. No one took the warnings seriously, and the collapse began in earnest early in 2007. In the last 5 years or so, many publishers come from the accounting or financial disciplines, where they used to be either Newsroom or Advertising professionals. Accountants tend to cut expense to reach the profit target. They do not have the vision, or temperament to take risk. Therefore, they cut to profitability. And they did, and continue to do. Unfortunately, at some point that approach reaches an end. When that end has been reached, that visionless publisher has cut most of the talent that could have kept the long term issues from becoming as severe- possibly avoid it altogether. Now, when they need the very best and brightest talent, that talent has been driven out of the business.

Now, they still refuse to believe that the web will eventually replace them. Unfortunately, they still have no long term vision...and think the recession is the problem. Now that current short sighted view drives even more away from them. If you own stock in publicly traded newspapers...don't expect any significant return to greatness in the near future!

[swaps]

I work in the print news media and I agree the problem is content. I edit a 1500-circulation weekly and virtually all the 600 street copies I put out are snapped up by the time I get back a week later. I focus on local news - crime, human features, courts, local sports and meetings.

On the national level, the problem is that a lot of news is now appearing on the internet because the clowns in charge have to defer to the agenda-driven money men who are going along with the fantasy-illusions being spun by the Administrations.

I look at the original footage CNN shot at the Pentagon onthe Second Day of Infamy and then I read the official news coverage, and I allege that accounts for the masses increasingly waking up and realizing mass media - print and electronic - are irrelevant and inaccurate.

The Denver Post has spilled tons of ink to detail the plight of poor illegally here aliens who are struggling in their attempts to get free college, free medicine and to maintain a birth rate here that is much higher than back in repressive Mejico. The Post ignores the plight of the legally here native Americans whose jobs were outsourced and now must compete with the wage-busting immigrants that callous, nation deconstructing opportunists have lured in.

The globalist driven agenda that deflates wages - has destroyed the banks, which require ever inflating wages to pay off usury. Now that wage deflation is taking out the midldle class that used to read newspapers. Young 20 somethings struggling in their jungles not only have an aversion to reading, they have an aversion to paying $300 a year for media that stains your hands black and does not have relevant content that can't be found anywhere else cheaper.