President's Question:

17 Responses to “What is the future of the newspaper?”

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   Dominic Boyer :
   December 3rd, 2008 at 6:33 pm

   The future of the newspaper and of news organizations more generally is clearly a pressing topic for social scientific research. Personaly, I’m currently in the middle of an anthropological research project focusing on the contemporary transformation of news journalism in the ecology of digital media.

   I would suggest, however, that we don’t begin our investigation by assuming that the newspaper is in crisis nor that it is doomed (by the internet or other new media) to disappear. Crisis talk about the collapse of print media is as old as the telegraph and yet the print publishing industry continues to expand. According to the World Association of Newspapers, although newspaper circulation modestly declined (about 8%) in North America and Western Europe from 2003-2007, circulation was stable or rising in almost 80% of countries world-wide (see http://www.wan-press.org/article17377.html). Unfortunately, the global picture isn’t usually acknowledged in media coverage of the decline of “the newspaper” (by which they mean actually European and American newspapers). Likewise, globally speaking, advertising investment in newspapers is also growing. One can still argue, of course, that these global trends may change in the next decade or two, but for the moment print journalism is still very robust in most parts of the world.

   I’m sorry to disagree with Craig here but the bottom line is that print journalism can still be very profitable, even in the U.S. Sociologist Eric Klinenberg demonstrates, for example, in his book “Fighting for Air” that, surprisingly enough given all the crisis talk, the average profit margins in the newspaper business exceed those of the oil business. The problem is therefore not that print journalism is not profitable. The problem is that institutional investors have lost faith in the long term viability of the newspaper model of news delivery and they have been placing unreasonable profit expectations upon publicly-traded newspaper companies according to the logic that they should squeeze profit out while they still can. This is what has led to the “death spiral” of cutbacks and downsizing at many American newspapers, even though they remain greatly profitable.

   Meanwhile, it is actually online journalism that is struggling to turn a profit and most online news departments depend upon the profitability of their print siblings for their continued existence. The exception are internet news aggregators like Google News that are quite profitable simply because they do not invest in producing new news content themselves but rather gather and organize news content from primary producers like newspapers and news agencies.

   All that said, the internet will likely continue to play a larger role in the news business, and the newsroom of the 21st century will probably increasingly see itself as a mini wire service feeding out branded content through a number of different news platforms (print, broadcast, internet, mobile, etc.). In this scenario, the newspaper won’t disappear but it will surely transform likely in the direction of more personalized content. Some scholars, not least Michael Schudson, are suggesting that newspaper will gradually move out of the breaking news business and into background and context-oriented stories. That could actually be quite an exciting transformation for newspapers and some journalists think it could even lead to better journalism. But this all depends not only on finding good business models but on finding means of financial support that values quality journalism as an end-in-itself over maximizing profitability. That is the frontline struggle in the news industry today.

   Dominic Boyer
   Department of Anthropology
   Rice University

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   Angela Phillips :
   December 4th, 2008 at 6:59 am

   Journalism is most certainly in transition and the central question raised here, about the effects of these changes on democracy, is the subject of the Goldsmiths research project: “Spaces of the News”. There seems little doubt that the changes brought about by the internet and digital technology are capable of broadening and democratising information gathering, however our research indicates that this is not happening in practice - at least not yet. To be sure methods have changed. Where once audiences across the world would have had to wait for journalists to go out into the field in order to bring back, and then transmit news, now a huge quantity of material is being sent directly to them in their offices. Nevertheless the reports that are selected, edited and disseminated, tend to be supported by the same narrow range of authoritative sources that have always been turned to and there is evidence that, working under increasing pressure, journalists have less time to do the independent research and verification upon which good authoritative reporting depends. Indeed we are seeing, in the fiercely competitive environment of the internet, a narrowing of the “news net” rather than the hoped for widening as news organisations, suffering from a crippling fear of missing something, copy one another’s output. Many (though not all) news organisations, panicking as their audiences and advertisers move online, seem to be running after the popular (publishing increasing quantities of celebrity news for example) rather than staking out a claim for what they do best: high quality reporting. This may not, in the long term, be their best mode of survival. Gossip (be it political or celebrity) can be produced on a shoe-string by bloggers but bloggers cannot duplicate the routine slog of daily reporting. That needs a well-funded organisation behind it. Fortunately good news reporting will continue to be a saleable product because people don’t have time to trawl the internet for news. They need trustworthy organisations to investigate, verify and then bring together and disseminate, information. There is no doubt that the way in which news is delivered is changing, both technically and organisationally, but panic is premature. Those organisations that invest in reporting will undoubtedly ride out the current turbulence and find a new place as delivery systems settle down.

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   Eszter Hargittai :
   December 4th, 2008 at 10:01 am

   These are very good questions and I will just address a few of them here. Unfortunately due to relatively little good research in the area, we can mostly just speculate on some of the implications even though it would be preferable to draw on findings from relevant projects. Nonetheless, there is some work out there that is helpful to consider in this discussion. For example, there have been some empirical tests of Cass Sunstein’s hypotheses regarding the fragmentation and polarization of audiences in the age of digital media that allow news readers (and listeners/viewers) to customize the information they get much easier than has been possible in the past thereby isolating people from those with whom they disagree. Regarding blogs, findings certainly suggest that there is much more interlinking among bloggers of similar ideological persuasion. On the other hand, there is little evidence of this changing over time. Of course, more work on a longer time frame with larger samples drawn from multiple domains would be helpful here.

   There is an interesting assumption in the post, a suggestion that moving content online necessarily means less shared experiences. Matthew Hindman’s book – hot off the press – on the Myth of Digital Democracy addresses this point and finds a continued or possibly even increasing concentration of sources from which people get their news. (I have also found similar concentration in where people turn for cultural information online.) Of course, going to the same source doesn’t necessarily mean being exposed to the same information, but nor was everyone necessarily reading the same sections of printed newspapers.

   Given that a good chunk of Americans is still not online and that these tend to be less privileged folks, there are implications for who will be left out of the conversation. Even among those who are online, only a small percentage of users take advantage of the many participatory aspects of Web 2.0 services and the required skills are in no way randomly distributed among the population (yet they are a predictor of who participates). What does it mean if the most likely voices in online political discussions are male, highly educated and well off? If online newspapers decide to tailor their content increasingly in response to the perspectives represented by readers on their sites then the content will become increasingly skewed toward the type of content of interest to only a very specific homogenous group not necessarily representative of the publication’s readership, rather, just of those who actively participate on the sites.

   It would be important to commit some resources to studying some of these questions empirically, now, before more print newspapers disappear completely. That way, we would have more baseline information as comparison to what may emerge in the future. The more we know about news consumption practices today, the better we’ll be able to say how much better or worse (or just different) things will have gotten in the future.

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   Michael Schudson :
   December 4th, 2008 at 11:45 am

   The hemorrhaging of jobs at leading news organizations is deeply worrisome for the future of news. The lion’s share of what is produced in the blogosphere, like the lion’s share of radio and television news, is parasitic on the multi-employee factories called newspapers.

   That said, and no ready solution about to be offered here, I would name two considerations for thinking about the future of news:

   1. We should give up the notion that we have fallen away from a media-produced unified public sphere in the USA. If it existed, it was for a brief historical moment. Even in the age of Web-based media and cable, we have a more unified national news picture today than at any time in US history before the Kennedy administration. TV network news didn’t have its sacred place in US homes until the early 1960s. The New York Times did not have a visible public presence outside the New York-Washington corridor until the 1970s. NPR and CNN did not exist until the 1970s and 1980s respectively. If there was a golden age of a media public sphere, it had about a 25 year run.

   2. Meanwhile, these same past few decades have seen a remarkable growth of accountability institutions both in and out of government. In government: growing openness in the Congress and capacity for citizens to monitor legislative action and in the executive the rise of inspectors-general (1978 legislation) who have produced scathing public criticism of executive action (notably the hard-hitting reports of the Dept of Justice IG during the Bush years) that became the subject of scores of front-page stories. Journalists have a lot of high-powered research assistants today! The news media are part of a broad ecology of public information today rather than the lone rangers of truth-telling.

   “Out of Government”: beginning in the 1960s, there was a proliferation of NGOs to monitor power and public affairs. A few of these agencies have been around for generations — the ACLU and the NAACP — but most are post-1960s. They play vital roles in today’s ecology of public information (for instance, the news media kept alive investigation of US uses of torture in recent years by using ACLU-gathered data, itself acquired by use of the Freedom of Information Act that itself dates only to 1966 and only to 1974 as a piece of legislation with a degree of force).

   Our conventional image of how to keep institutions of power accountable to the Constitution and to norms of democratic life has not yet adjusted to these transformations of the past 40 years, now technologically catapulted into a new dimension in the past 10 to 15 years.

   Could it be — here’s heresy for you — that democratic life can be better off with a proliferation of cottage-industry news organizations rather than the preservation of hundreds of news factories?

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   Todd Gitlin :
   December 4th, 2008 at 3:01 pm

   Three overlapping crises throw the future of the Western newspaper into question. First, there is a crisis of attention. Publics, especially and increasingly the young, prefer making contact with the world through electronic media, especially visual forms that offer more intense sensation and more speedy contact. This development preceded the Internet, which obviously accelerates it greatly. Second, there is a crisis of economics. Advertising migrates onto the Web and free, perfunctory newspapers thrive at the same time that publicly-held companies demand unattainable profits. Third, there is a crisis of authority. Postmodern skepticism about God’s-eye objectivity (not only in journalism but in medicine, academia, and popular lore) thrives at the same time that technology expedites fragmentation (cable TV, the Internet), draining confidence away from mainstream media. Even before the advent of the Internet, consider the 1981 shift from Walter Cronkite’s “That’s the way it is” to Dan Rather’s “That’s part of our world today.” Just this week, in deciding to add links to other (“rival,” they used to call them) news sources as appendages to its own home-page reports, the New York Times confesses (or boasts) that it is now in the business of delivering (as Rasmus Kleis Nielsen nicely puts it) “All the News That’s Fit to Curate.” Times Extra is not exactly News from Nowhere.

   Some of the future seems pretty plain: Almost all paid newspaper circulation (again, in the West) is plunging a few percent every year—irreversibly, it would seem. Only the Wall Street Journal, to my knowledge, has found a way to monetize its online version, the widely heard call for “a new business model” keeps coming up blank. Younger readers increasingly migrate away from the dead-tree editions (and books, too, but that’s another story). A price spiral continues. The per-copy cost of the paper goes up, purchasers recede, the per-copy cost goes up further. Still, this does not mean that newspapers disappear. It means that they become even more of an educated taste than they have been.

   As many have pointed out, the Internet is vastly stronger on commentary and aggregation than it is on reporting. If for no other reason than that reporting is expensive, this will continue to be true. Citizen photos in an emergency, as in London in 2003 or Mumbai in 2008, will not, and cannot, provide steady coverage of institutional matters; they cannot cover beats, cannot “follow the money.” The more accomplished bloggers can “connect the dots”—a necessary function not so well discharged by newspapers—but they cannot ink in the dots in the first place.

   The wise newspaper companies will attach themselves to profit centers, as (reportedly under the tutelage of board member Warren Buffett) the Washington Post did in 1984 when it acquired the immensely profitable Stanley H. Kaplan test preparation business, which now subsidizes its newspaper losses. Young Arthur Sulzberger no doubt kicks himself for having failed to make an equally judicious investment. I would like to see public subsidies for newspapers, a la Scandinavia, but very much doubt they are politically feasible.

   I hope we see a greater range of online nonprofit endeavors like ProPublica and the Washington Independent, but do not expect that they will in the foreseeable future provide the go-to source for a diverse, more or less unitary public. They will be boutique items. Democracy needs them. But the social cohesion they afford will be minimal, even negligible. I very much doubt that an organ like that could crack open a Watergate scandal, or Enron, on their own, without migration to more encompassing organs like the New York Times. Most of our public discourse will be in the hands of fragment-based media.

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   Herbert J Gans :
   December 4th, 2008 at 3:36 pm

   Todd Gitlin’s response says it almost all; I add a few thoughts:

   1. Institutions take a long time to disappear and can live on half dead for quite a while.

   2. I suspect the national newspapers we deserve will survive and perhaps even grow, especially if they get help from corporate subsidiaries and their own websites, cable channels etc to help pay for the reporters, editors etc who actually gather and communicate the news.

   3. The strongest demand has always been for local news, and that will remain tho in what form it will be supplied remains to be seen. However, as long as department stores and shopping malls need to advertise, even local papers should be able to make it.

   4. I am most concerned with the survival of investigative reporting, analytic and empirical; the so called watchdog function of the news media, since both our governments and our major corporations need constant surveillance and checking up on. Who will pay for such reporting if and when the big news media are no longer willing or able is one of the big unanswered questions. Some of us hope some of the most affluent private foundations will help.

   5. Social movements will do nicely with the new technology, at least until they are big and can get their publicity in the national news media, as they now do. Also. someday there will most likely be major national mainstream websites that will supplement and eventually perhaps replace the current national mainstream news media.

   6. Don’t forget word of mouth; it remains and will remain the best mass medium around, and the cell phone type technology to communicate it seems to be advancing faster than the new technology serving the professional news media.

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   Rasmus Kleis Nielsen :
   December 5th, 2008 at 11:43 am

   Calhoun quickly slided from the overall question, ‘what is the future of the newspaper?’, to the more particular question of what the future is for the national newspaper.

   When discussing the future of both journalism and newspapers (or ‘the media’, for that matter), I think it is important to keep in mind just how stratified the profession and the organizational population is, from well-paid reporters and nationally known outlets to precarious freelancing and generic chain papers. Stratification is a fact not only globally, as Boyer points out, but also within a country like the US.

   So I have a few thoughts about the future of the mid-sized American newspaper, the kind that serves a small metropolitan area, the kind that has a daily circulation of, say, 40,000, and will often be the only newspaper in a given location, and hence one of few organizations doing actual newsgathering. Such local monopolies have been phenomenally profitable in the past, and underwritten a lot of newsgathering, but clearly that is changing now as jobs are cut everywhere–and in contrast to major national and international events (Calhoun’s example of Mumbia springs to mind, surely, there is no shortage of journalists there right now, and won’t be at future events of that type–power law distributions of attention from both audiences and the industry will concentrate effort right there, just as political conventions and royal weddings will continue to draw hundreds or thousands of journalists writing essentially identical stories), it is exceedingly unclear to me who will cover the next misuse of power, case of corruption, or conflict of interest in a city like Bridgeport, CT. There, the last Mayor, Fabrizi, used cocaine while in office, and the Mayor before him, Ganim, is serving nine years for racketeering, bribery, extortion, mail fraud and tax evasion. What happens there if the Connecticut Post is reduced to an advertising sheet? The NY Times has been cutting down on its reporters in the region. A NPR affiliate does some reporting. A few political community blogs contributes a fair amount of actual newsgathering. But the alternatives to the ConnPost are few and far between.

   The NY Times and a few other nationally known brands can probably transform themselves into the kinds of multi-platform brand management/news production companies that Boyer writes about, or branch out in the test preparation, continuing education, or what not. Others can pursue what Gitlin calls the ‘fragment-based’ strategy of magazines and many online sites, and appeal to a single, often geographically distributed, audience. These options do not seem to me to be open to the Connecticut Post. I like the Connecticut Post. I like the fact it is there. But I would never for a second want a cent of my 401(k) invested in it, because I think it is in a deeply precarious position.

   So what can it do? Hope for the public subsidies that more and more are arguing for, even if the idea continues to be anathema for many American journalists? Hope for non-profits to step in (a shift in mentality from ‘profitable’ to ‘fundable’ news production)? Hope that the transformation of government institutions and the growth of independent oversight bodies that Schudson writes about will bring down the costs of reporting? Wait for an angle owner to materialize?

   What can the paper itself do? I don’t know. The owner, MediaNews Group, seems hell-bent on cost-cutting and consolidation, but I have yet to see much in terms of new ideas from them. Or even a serious attempt to implement some of the ideas that have been floating around for the last decade or so. So, OK, blame the corporate bean counters, and blame technological change. Things were much better back in the day, at least for most journalists. But what about journalists themselves? Whether it comes to the adoption of new technologies or the pursuit of new forms of content-production, one sometimes gets the sense (from my own research on the adoption of new technologies in Danish newspapers, from the research pursued by others, and anecdotally from spending many of my waking hours with journalists, journalists-to-be, and their products) that journalists are their own worst enemies. At least some of them–it might be useful to distinguish broadly between ‘new’ and ‘old journalists’ the same way we talk about new and old media. The idea of an emphasis on the things that even these cash-strapped mid-sized local papers (indeed especially these) have monopoly on, namely local news, combined with a stronger development of their community side (from ‘the’ newspaper to ‘my’ newspaper) requires taking seriously user-generated content, involvement with local community events, etc—and thus either an expanded journalistic professional self-understanding, that embraces the idea that facilitation of discussion and community are valuable parts of what journalists do (as they have been historically), or a diversification of the workforce into professions trained to and willing to work with communities. This model should be able to sustain some sort of operation. It is not pursued. The front page of the Connecticut Post website today is filled with national news. Why? Who are they kidding? Why not just link? And print a few national stories in the print edition and get on with the job of covering Bridgeport and what they are up to in Hartford?

   That model may lead to a scaled down operation relative to the heyday of the 1980s (at least in areas that still has a location-bound population and commercial life, but arguable, that continues to be the case for much of the country). Such local newspapers may cease being career destinations, and be more like incubators that no longer employ journalists for more than a few years (according to payscale.com, a journalists with 1-4 years of experience earns about $33k/year, whereas one with 5-9 years earns about $44k/year on average), but give them a chance to show what they can do, that they are ‘new journalists’, and function as stepping stones for people interested in pursuing a further career later either in more resource-rich media elsewhere, or perhaps a transition into various forms of communications jobs in their local community–think of the way political campaigning only is a life-long career for a very, very few of the many young, talented, and driven people who take it up at one point or other in their life, but still often ‘leads somewhere’, into non-profits, into government, etc.

   There are hundreds of mid-sized local and regional newspapers like the Connecticut Post around the country, and a few may be saved by angels, but the rest, and especially the chain-owned ones and the ones dominated by a traditional form of journalistic self-undesrtanding, are likely to continue to cut and cut and cut while they wait for the elusive new business model, the subsidies they may not even really want, or the angels that there may be precious few of. When thinking about the future of the American newspapers, I like to make a provocative comparison to the future of monasteries in Europe, seen from the vantage point of, say 1600AD–the question at stake when the transformation set in was not the survival of ‘the monastery’, because some survived in recognizable form, even as others were transformed to educational institutions, eventually to resorts, and what not, but the dramatic contraction of the continent-wide institution of monasteries. That contraction seems to have been partly driven by precisely the kind of unsustainability of individual organizations that ‘the American newspaper’ as an institution face today, arguably exacerbated by ‘old journalists’ reluctant to embrace new technologies, new forms of funding (whether subsidies or non-profit), and new journalistic practices. I root for a generation of new journalists, and hope there will be jobs for them as they go out into the world. There will be newspapers in the future, probably even printed ones, and every country will, I think, continue to have a ‘paper of record’–but at the local level, they may be few and far between, unless change happens soon, and that scarcity will, I fear, be much more pronounced and pernicious at the local and regional level than at the national level.

   Citation → rasmuskleisnielsen.net [December 5, 2008]

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   Chris Anderson :
   December 5th, 2008 at 3:32 pm

   I’ll join the ranks of Columbia University folks weighing in on this question.

   First, I’m glad to see this issue getting the attention it is, though its sad that it has taken the impending collapse of the newspaper industry to get us here. My own thoughts on this come out of a multi-year project examining local news production in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. You can read about the project here. I’ve been conducting online qualitative work on this topic since 2006 and completed 5 months of on-site fieldwork earlier this fall.

   http://journalismschool.wordpress.com/2008/07/09/what-im-doing-1-the-big-picture/

   I think it’s useful to reframe the initial question we’re asking as “What is the future of news reporting?” (I’ll add to the list in a moment). Asking the question as it is usually framed– “what is the future of the newspaper” or, more often “what is the future of journalism”– can lead to a conceptual muddle. By asking, what is the future of the newspaper, we are limiting ourselves to a medium, to a product (and probably setting ourselves up for disaster; I think the newspaper is doomed). By asking, what is the future of journalism, we are lumping a number of distinct forms of work together. After all, critics, columnists, and providers of news analysis for the New York Times can all be considered journalists. So can editorial cartoonists. It might be interesting to ask, “what is the future of editorial cartooning,” but its probably even more interesting to ask, “what is the future of news reporting,” or as I call it, “the gathering together of ‘news objects.’”

   We can start answering this question in any number of ways, methodologically speaking. My own tack has been to look closely, almost obsessively, at the processes of news work, the kind of work that members of a particular media community do, and let them define for themselves what reporting and journalism are, and how it is changing.

   I think that the future of reporting, sad to say, is bleak, at least under the circumstances we’ve known it to occur: reporting is at the wrong end of economic trends (it is expensive) audience trends (people may not care about it) and technological trends. Its funny to think that something so banal as talking to people and reading documents is so costly, but it is. All s not lost, however: I think new forms of reporting / advocacy / conversation will emerge, that may look a lot like this.

   http://youngphillypolitics.com/city_paper_effects_ypp_poll_and_other_online_organizing_budget_cuts

   Reporting, in other words, may become the province of social movements– not newspapers. The fast we come to terms with the fact that someone can be both a reporter and a member of a social movement or issue constituency, the happier we will be with this outcome. At the same time, while reporting may be more tied to movements, movement members who become reporters may increasingly resemble the newspaper reporters of old. I guess we’ll see.

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   Paul Steiger :
   December 5th, 2008 at 4:50 pm

   With respect, the issue should not be “what is the future of the newspaper?”, but rather “what is the future of the journalism for which we have looked to newspapers?” The future of newspapers, as such, may not be bright, and even the outlook for their web sites has been clouded a bit by the slowing in the growth of web advertising this year.

   But it seems to me that it is still very early days in the evolution of “newspaper” journalism. A great deal of experimentation is just beginning, much of it aimed at devising models for sustaining the distinctive forms of narrative reporting and fact-based analysis that have distinguished newspapers in modern times. The news organization I head, ProPublica, is one such experiment, but there are others, including promising local ventures such as voiceofsandiego and MinnPost. All three of these are non-profit, but globalpost, another experiment which launches soon, aims to make money.
   The web, in and of itself, offers journalism much promise: costs of publishing are a fraction of the past, speed of publishing is much greater, distribution is instantly global. These factors cannot help but be pro-democratic, and create more effective checks on governments.

   It is true that the lowering of barriers to entry has atomized publishing, and limits on advertising revenue, if they are sustained, may tend in the same direction. This proliferation of publishers may be thought to undermine social cohesion. But it is not necessarily so. Again, we are in the early days of this medium, and it may well be that some relatively few trusted voices will grow louder and larger as the medium begins to mature. In that case, the audience could be drawn somewhat back together.

   But even if that is not the case, even if a million web flowers continue to bloom in perpetuity, there will likely be continuing, indeed accelerating need for judgment, experience and reporting in making sense of the web, and of the world, for readers. The events in Mumbai are a perfect case in point. Yes, “citizen journalists” contributed raw material of true value. But they also helped spread the initial word that the attacks were aimed at Westerners, especially British and Americans, which in retrospect they clearly were not. It took insightful, skilled journalists such as Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria to quickly discern that this was not the case, and to explain why he knew that. And it took professional journalists, such as the team from The Wall Street Journal, to make sense of the chaos of the attack, and render it in a comprehensive and comprehensible narrative.

   So while I am not sure what I think about the future of newspapers, I remain quite hopeful about the future of “newspaper” journalism.

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    Brett Gary :
    December 6th, 2008 at 7:12 pm

    The problem of the decline of newspapers is, I think, especially problematic for small towns and cities that rely especially on their local and regional newspapers for serious coverage of local and regional matters. Absent tough minded, aggressive journalistic coverage of local matters, people dependent on their local papers stand to lose vital links to the day to day decision-making processes and their implications about local matters: economic matters, labor matters, environmental matters, transportation and planning issues, zoning and development, educational matters, public hearings, etc. These are the issues that are vital to citizen involvement in the local sphere, and are the starting point for participation in democratic life. The public, to have detailed, ongoing knowledge of these matters need their local journalists, editors, and publishers to pay attention and offer coverage. This is especially crucial because commercial radio consolidation of the airwaves means that “local” radio stations might not be local at all, with no commitments to news gathering or promotion of local public affairs broadcasting. I think it’s also fair to say that low power FM stations aren’t going to fill an important news void. So, in the absence of decent local/regional papers with seasoned, maybe even well-trained reporters, or ambitious cub reporters on their way up in the world, who will attend the city council meetings, or the environmental impact hearings, or the state and federal courthouses, or the statehouses? Perhaps local bloggers will tend to these vitally important sites of local politics and power, but I’m not so sure they will, and I’m not so sure how far into those regional communities their blogs will reach. Maybe younger readers, habituated to life on internet will figure out how to keep track of what the local gold mining companies are threatening to do to local river systems, or what deals local power company monopolies have swung with the regional power planning councils, but the older readers won’t.

    When thinking about these matters I have my parents and their generation in mind – and the small western town I grew up in — where the local paper was and continues to be a vital source of communication, conversation, and provocation. Go into the local cafes, bars, doctors offices, and you’ll find the paper, and someone reading it. It is part of the lifeblood of the region, and it and hundreds of other papers like it are crucial to local democratic life. If they become only advertising gazettes, then something crucial is lost. Again, maybe bloggers and other citizen journalists would fill this void. But in the ideologically fragmented world of the blogosphere, I fear a common vehicle for conversation about local matters will be lost. The local papers are, truth to tell, pathetic vehicles for coverage of national and international affairs. They always have been, but they are vital to informing local publics about their local affairs, and the Deweyan in me recognizes their value in establishing the conversational starting points for democratic life. As instruments for keeping local publics informed about things national and international, they are easily supplanted by far better sources, but I’m not sure where those better sources will come from with respect to local coverage. I know my parents and their friends’ lives would be much diminished without their daily chronicle. They can go to other sources for the national and international issues of the moment, but they have nowhere else to go to find out what blunder their local planning board is contemplating.

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    Joe Karaganis :
    December 8th, 2008 at 11:20 am

    It’s worth noting that the ‘crisis’ that we’re seeing in the form of staff cuts, bankruptcies, and sell-offs has an important short-term accelerator—distinct from long-term declines in circulation and ad revenue. As Boyer notes above, newspapers have not only been very profitable in the past—for the most part, they still are. Borrowing figures from the estimable Newsosaur, US newspaper profits averaged 27% between 2000 and 2007. They may still come close to 20% in 2008.

    Although profits are under pressure, the immediate problem is debt. Over the last decade, many of the big newspaper groups sought relief from revenue pressures through expansion. Earnings were leveraged to acquire other newspapers—often at prices that reflected assumptions about continued high profitability. Debt service was pegged to those assumptions.

    As a result, many of the largest newspaper groups entered the current economic crisis highly endebted. These include the Tribune Company ($12.5 billion), the New York Times Company ($1.1 billion), McClatchy ($1.175 billion), Lee Enterprises, MediaNews, Morris Communications, Philadelphia Media, Star Tribune, Gatehouse Media and the Journal-Register ($642 million), among the most prominent—and vulnerable. Nine of the 13 largest groups have junk-level bond ratings, which make refinancing expensive even in a good lending environment.

    The current economic crisis has not killed the profitability of these groups, but it has reduced profits to levels that make their debt difficult or impossible to service. What we’re seeing now—and will see more of in the near future—is a brutal process of deleveraging as this valuation bubble pops.

    The debt situation alone will hasten the large-scale restructuring of the industry—with some substantial part of it passing through bankruptcy. The critical question is whether the core functions of journalism can reorganized and sustained on a lower-profit-margin basis. The tragedy of the current debt crisis is that the process of finding out is likely to be faster, more chaotic, and vastly more destructive of institutions and personnel than it needed to be.

    Joe Karaganis
    SSRC

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    Gaye Tuchman :
    December 8th, 2008 at 12:33 pm

    I very much appreciate many of the points people have made. I particularly like Michael Schudson’s observation that many media are currently dependent on newspapers. Although the term “shovelware” was invented to describe how internet sites convert newspaper and “wire” stories to “electronic news,” radio and television also borrow freely from newspapers. (Indeed, some newspapers continue to “borrow” from one another. ) Although community sites and even such august newspapers as the New York Times invoke public journalism to encourage people to post descriptions of events they have witnessed, no one has yet explained how publics will manage to learn information that those in power do not want them to know. Nor can the gradual demise of newspapers tell us is how the basic categories that guide the production of news will change. We can only know that just as ideas about objectivity changed from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, so too fifty years from now what “users” will want to post on-line will be inevitably different from users’ concerns today.

    The perceived need for local businesses to advertise does not mean that there will be local newspapers as we know them. Rather, it is quite possible that as advertising shifts, the content of print media may change. The shift of national advertising for such products as automobiles and appliances from general magazines to television is a case in point. New magazines survived by appealing to specialized audiences, such as everyone who had a television set (TV Guide) and everyone who was interested in the life of celebrities (People). I hope that on the local level at least those changing categories of news production will still address what I might recognize as democratic concerns instead of the lives of the latest celebrities.

    Talk about the future of news necessarily include anticipating the day when one can learn information on television, the internet, one’s cell phone and one’s MP3 player, as well as on other media whose existence I cannot anticipate. Each of these is a different regulatory environment and how regulation occurs will have an awesome impact on what people will know and how they will come to know it. Scholars are already (rightly) worrying about “net neutrality” – which might be defined as the freedom from corporatization and the freedom to access information without invading others’ privacy. In corporatization I include both the hypermedia’s invasion of privacy and better net access to corporate actors than to individual “users. What if the internet and other media become like cable television and individuals (as opposed to corporations) are limited to the sites available through their providers? As it stands now, the internet is now “merely” awesomely commercial, a haven for corporate enterprises, but not itself controlled by corporate licenses.

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    Geneva Overholser :
    December 13th, 2008 at 11:58 pm

    Thank heaven for this water in a dry desert! How can it BE that so few scholars attend to so critically important a subject?!! I know, I know, journalists are a key part of the answer. But no more! The need is great, crisis creates the opportunity for thoughtful reasoned voices to be heard. Let the academic research on this subject no longer face backward but take on these new challenges in practical ways, which CAN now have impact.

    All the right points are raised here. Let us summon  others to continue the debate. Let us delve into the problems, link to the best thinking, deepen the discussion. No time to lose.   

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14. +
    Risto Kunelius :
    December 15th, 2008 at 3:26 am

    If there is one word that captures change in the landscape in which newspapers operate it must be competition. Newspapers – or indeed, journalism we look for in them – has had to adapt to an increasingly open environment. Technological, cultural, and political contexts used to synchronically produce an environment where a certain amount of professional autonomy could be protected. This is no longer the case, and we are we beginning to see the consequences.

    I study and teach at journalism in the context of a late Nordic welfare state, in Finland. Here the newspaper business has so far been able to defend itself against a full blown crisis (with fusions and rationalization, mainly). The public service ethos of broadcasting is still alive, although debates about the operating range and mandate of public service broadcasting and webcasting are getting more and more intense. And we are still only ‘seriously worried’ and utterly confused about how the facebook- and google-generations are going to want to access their news.
    But even without the actual crisis, the sense of increasing competition has set in. A brief look at the way journalism has reacted to this pressure might help to speculate a bit about its future. There are at least three interconnected trends that have, I think, gained strength during the last 15 years or so.

    1. Journalism has a become more distinct public agent. The performative tension between journalism and other social institutions is increasing. Journalists claim a mandate of being ‘detached’ and ‘critical’ while declaring that they are at the same time ‘neutral’. While this can be a democratically healthy articulation of ‘suspicion about power’ it also favors a division of labor, where it is the task of journalists to dramatize and clarify the plots of public life, but it is still the task of the institutions of power to control the contents and set the agenda. With the decreasing resources of news work, the role of a scriptwriter – instead of the gatekeeper or the watchdog – institutionally makes sense. It defines, perhaps, a new terrain of autonomy that works for a while in the new competitive environment.

    2. Newsrooms have reorganized themselves, with two things in mind: to produce content for multiple platforms and to play a more proactive (distinct) role. This is vital not only because competition calls for instant ‘added value’ from your brand to the consumer, but also the fact production must be secured. Thus, in order to survive, newspapers in particular (or also) have started to invest on news planning and design. Template journalism rules. While this active, team-work driven and future oriented news room can potentially play a more prominent role in public life, it also tends to make journalism less creative, more ‘formatted’ and in some ways more predictable.

    3. Journalism talks increasingly to individuals and through individuals. It has privatized its language of public affairs. Opinions of journalists themselves matter more than ever. News is framed through individuals, examples and case citizens. And finally, there is a growing sense of affective journalism: feelings matter more and they have to be embraced. While such ‘engaging’ strategies might help journalism to sustain audience attention, they might not be the most relevant ways of addressing the problems people will actually be facing in the future.

    In the context of the late-welfare state in Nordic countries, such changes refer to certain a loss of local particularism. The ‘social democratic’, class-based social contract of the Nordic welfare state has been losing its legitimacy for the regime of ‘competitive state’. As systemic reactions to such broader changes, journalism’s reaction also has a tendency support those changes. At the same time some fundamentals of the profession are changing.
    If journalism’s authority earlier relied on borrowing an aura of expertise from other system actors (with their consent), its authority will rely more on its own expertise of handling the (moral) drama of public life. If journalism’s legitimacy earlier grew out of an imagined inclusive national audience of citizens, it will be based on a polarization between special services for niche audiences and the spectacular creation of grand events which evoke affective identities. If journalism’s relevance was based on the idea of a citizen with a vested interest in the operations of the state, future journalism will measure its usefulness with individual opinions, pleasures and private benefits.
    All these changes are not necessarily for the bad. But if one bears in mind some of the grand scale ‘challenges’ we are facing globally (global warming, inter-cultural tensions, economic crisis… just to name a few), it is not clear that the trends of market-driven journalism will serve as well as we need to be served. That means, logically, that other kinds of journalism will have to look for operating room in arrangements that place its logic at least partly outside the landscape of short term competition. In this respect, the big question for a more diverse journalistic future is: Are there such alliances available?

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15. +
    Andrew Haeg :
    December 16th, 2008 at 2:18 am

    I’ve heard many in the industry argue that the crisis in journalism is one of revenue, not content. In other words, the industry lacks money, not solid journalism. I find that problematic, first because (as Joe Karaganis points out) it’s clearly not a revenue problem, but a debt and investor expectation problem.

    Second, I think the content has suffered greatly as the culture of the newsroom has become such a poisonous, cynical place where talk of ideas, innovation, facilitating conversation … or mention of words like empathy and design elicit sneers and dismissiveness.

    Let’s face it, in our zealous pursuit of the always elusive ideal of objectivity we’ve distanced ourselves from the madding crowds (the great unwashed, as one colleague not-so-jokingly put it) and, increasingly unaware of the actual needs we were meant to be fulfilling, began churning out ping-pong, he-said/she-said journalism that often leaves our audience no better off than before, and maybe even more confused. Among many other things, we’ve neglected the suburbs, failed to cover our immigrant communities from their perspective, failed to cover business with any sense of ongoing responsibility to make sense and raise the appropriate alarms. We’ve dutifully fed the news beast, but left the people who gather around us malnourished.

    Perhaps this crisis will force a period of reckoning upon us, and encourage journalists to redefine their role and their sense of what it means to work as part of, and in service to, a community. We need now to deploy people into our communities to un-cynically discover what information they need (not what they say they want, but need) and empathetically design (yes, design!) models for delivering needed information to the people we serve. You can call that journalism if you like. You can call it newspaper journalism. It really doesn’t matter what we call it so long as we do it.

    If we attend to needs first, and stick close our communities (talk to them, live among them, and understand their needs) then the money will follow.

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16. +
    Rodney Benson :
    December 18th, 2008 at 5:12 pm

    I agree with much of Andrew Haeg’s comments, but I take issue with his closing remark: “If we attend to needs first, and stick close to our communities … then the money will follow.”
     
    This is simply not true. And this belief – that “good journalism” is also “good business” – is probably the biggest obstacle out there to solving the crisis of journalism, by which I mean the crisis of not enough of the kind of journalism that will sustain and enrich democracy.
     
    It is almost universally acknowledged that the best journalism in the United States is sheltered, in one way or another, from market pressures. Our two best national newspapers – the New York Times and the Washington Post – are effectively controlled by family trusts that allow them to resist the profit-maximizing demands of stockholders. As New York Times editor Bill Keller said in a PBS Frontline documentary, “Thank God for the Sulzbergers!” Many of our best alternative media and political magazines are likewise supported by wealthy investors who are willing to forgo profits, or even take losses.
     
    But do we really want to stake our future on the whims of a few wealthy benefactors? The Chandlers and Bancrofts, after all, eventually grew tired of bankrolling the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times.
     
    Good journalism has sometimes been good business, yes, but there is no necessary connection between the two – especially when it comes to certain kinds of “good” journalism especially important in a democracy – foreign reporting, investigative reporting, etc. Perhaps there is a small “niche” market for this kind of journalism, but in that case, it wouldn’t be a model that most media could follow and expect to make profitable. 
     
    My point: It’s not just that the “old” business model isn’t working so well anymore. It never did. It only worked when some owners, or some journalists, or some foundations, decided to support civic over market demands.
     
    Journalists, it seems to me, are between a rock and a hard place, but won’t admit it.
     
    On the one hand, they have not been inclined in this country to pursue any type of collective action. A familiar pattern emerges. When cutbacks are announced, an editor protests and eventually resigns (as happened repeatedly at the Los Angeles Times). A new editor is hired, and the cutbacks resume. Journalists grumble, but they don’t organize and join together to do anything about it.
     
    On the other hand, most journalists are steadfastly opposed to any kind of public support. Some of our best journalism is produced by journalists working for the partially publicly-funded NPR (for which Andrew has worked) and PBS. One of the best news organizations in the world is the publicly-funded BBC. Newspapers in France or as Todd Gitlin mentioned, in several Scandinavian countries, receive public subsidies and produce some of the most intellectually rigorous, ideologically diverse, and critical journalism in the world. These subsidies are not about promoting a particular ideology (in France, for instance, subsidies have gone to the Catholic, the Communist, and the Far Right newspapers); they are not about restricting speech, but rather about “promoting” speech that isn’t adequately provided for by the market.
     
    (See C. Edwin Baker’s “Media, Markets, and Democracy” for a vigorous defense of carefully targeted policies to support non-commercial media. See also in CJR: http://www.cjr.org/feature/the_uncle_sam_solution.php)
     
    In this country, however, a First Amendment fundamentalism has blinded journalists to seeing ways in which government can be their ally. Again, it’s not a matter of government or no government – but what kind of government intervention — perhaps more tax breaks to foundations that underwrite investigative journalism or to journalist-owned and operated ventures, either online or offline — the possibilities are endless if the goal is to “promote” rather than “restrict” speech … I would just note as an aside that publicly-funded (subsidized, if you prefer) universities are crucial sources of critical research and writing, much of which makes its way into the public sphere. Why is it that journalists think that a market model (advertising, subscribers) is the only guarantee of their independence? 
     
    There is a growing citizens’ movement for media reform, but for the most part, journalists are notably absent from this effort. Why? One reason, I would argue, is that they continue to believe that there is somehow a “business” solution to a problem that is first and foremost civic in nature. The sooner they abandon this belief, the sooner they are likely to be a part of the actual solution.
     
    Rodney Benson
    Department of Media, Culture, and Communication
    New York University
     
     
     
     

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17. +
    Mark Deuze :
    January 16th, 2009 at 3:24 pm

    With due respect to the various brilliant posts above, please consider some unfinished thoughts regarding the discussion here.

    Asking a question of the future of media (the newspaper) is something quite different from asking a question about the future of a professional practice (journalism). Any answer to the first is historically not particularly satisfying, as Michael Schudson so wonderfully expresses.

    A future for/of journalism is imho contingent on a couple of considerations:

    1. Journalism has be decoupled from media, at the very least in the eyes of its practitioners. And not just in word, but in deed. Research among practitioners working in/with online/convergent news operations strongly suggests the future of journalism is tied up with a cultural shift, not a technological one.

    2. Related to point 1: A possible future for journalism should be all about talent - not technology. Considering mass lay-offs and a documented shift to “atypical” media work (see the 2006 IFJ report to that effect), the managerial impetus/challenge of the profession is to reinvest/build on its talent, independently of how that talent is affiliated or (sub-)contracted to the title. The title therefore is irrelevant.

    3. Labor laws should ideally move across borders, and serve to protect not (just) those who are already “in”, but those who in fact choose to stay outside: the independent professionals, the entrepreneurs, who do newswork outside of the newsroom system. there seems to be no protection for them, and even unions tend not to represent them very effectively. Related to this is the need for more informal or semi-formal (transnational) networks of news professionals. Like their media, most of their professional networks are hopelessly local or national, even when their industry has become truly global.

    4. Journalism students should not be trained for established news media organizations, but for the profession of journalism- there is a rather significant difference. Furthermore, scholars in the field of journalism studies should not consider it their job to defend or protect news media such as TV stations (ex. CNN) or newspapers (ex. New York Times), which are, ultimately, commercial corporations. Although understandable, by doing so we study (paraphrasing Ulrich Beck) zombie institutions through the lens of a zombie sociology (or any other discipline), rather than truly move the knowledge in our field forward. It sometimes seems the debates in journalism are historically more or less the same – which can be explained at least in part by this at times blind loyalty to this self-referential industry.

    There is obviously more to this - much better articulated by my colleagues in this thread. I do not fear the effects of a fragmented media marketplace, because our behavior in it is far from fragmented, and the news agenda has actually become much more isomorphic and coherent than in the past. In fact, I fear consensual, interinstitutional “Wikiality” much more than the excesses of a atomized “networked individualism” as Manuel Castells, Barry Wellman, and others articulate it.

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