The Newspaper Fix
Newspapers, in case you haven’t noticed, are in a real crunch these days. Fewer readers, higher costs and less eager advertisers.
No big surprise, right?
For one generation, reading the morning paper is a sacred ritual. For the newest generation, it is a cumbersome, boring mess.
We have become a nation of on-line readers, and headline-only news consumers. With an iPhone on the hip and CNN on the nearest office lobby monitor. Why pay for paper? It’s out of date as soon as its printed, soggy when it rains, full of ads and a waste of precious resources. Just think of the costly newsprint, ink and oil used to get that folded stack of newsprint to your door each morning. Yes, I still subscribe to two, but I know I’m in a shrinking minority. People in their twenties don’t read newspapers. Much less subscribe to one.
Consider also the archaic technology. Germany is credited with creating the first newspaper 500 years ago. It began as a handwritten neighborhood newsletter. Now it’s a thick Sunday pile punched out of a massive printing press and trundled around the city in the pre-dawn hours. It’s come a long way, and yet still the concept remains: put ink on paper and hand-deliver it to each recipient. Is that really the best way to deliver news and information in the 21st centrury? For some, yes. But for how much longer?
Among industry analysts, there is “no joy in Mudville”. Critics, Wall Street investors and “new media” proponents of every shape and stripe have offered estimates on how much longer the venerable metropolitan daily will survive. A few years? 18 months?
Or even weeks? Many are already in bankruptcy. Parent organizations of newspapers in Chicago, Philadelphia and Minneapolis are already deep in bankruptcy proceedings and a morbid guessing-game has begun as to which big paper will surrender next.
And a small consortium of newspaper owners and suporters have even begun an on-line roundtable debate and ad campaign to save the newpaper. Check out www.newspaperproject.org. Good articles and ideas, but in the end, no viable business model.
So here’s my two cents worth: Why not circumvent the whole printing and delivery process by morphing the newspaper into an e-mail attachment? Subscribers could conceivably use a standard home HP device, or even buy a unique home printer designed specifically for newspaper content. The customer could customize his own mix of subject matter and feature material from a long list, or buffet, of topics with an appropriate price. Each article would have an ad attached. The recipient could either read the paper on-line or print it out each morning. On his paper, using his ink.
Now just think about it. If you’re the owner of the paper, you’ve just eliminated all printing costs, all delivery costs. And yet you’re still in the business of journalism. You’ve just morphed the technology.
I know, I know. It would be a delicate dance to take down all the free content currently available on-line and force people to start paying for an on-line subscription. So you would have to start slowly. Maybe just the editorial content at first – only available through on-line subscription. Or the food and movie reviews. But something has to be done.
Consider what the phone companies have done: we have been systematically conditioned to pay ten or so cents for each text message we send or receive. And yet we pay newspaper organizations nothing to receive lengthy, beautifully-written articles by the dozen each day. It is simply unsustainable.
Would the conversion I describe be drastic, dramatic and expensive? Sure. But consider the alternative.
About a hundred and fifty years ago, people criss-crossed the country by wagon train. Using horses as the primary engines of transportation. Then a new technology arrived: the steam locomotive. Smart businessmen who owned wagon trains had to ask themselves a very important question: Am I in the horse and buggy business, or the transportation business?
Now a similar profound shift is underway. And newspaper owners must ask themselves a similar question: Which business am I in – the delivery of print on paper, or the delivery of credible, creative news and information – that is, journalism – by whatever means?
