Illustration by Cameron Rasmussen

Editorial: Adapt or Die

by Daniel Doherty

American journalism is in the midst of an unprecedented crisis. The role of the newspaper as a check on abuse of power, as a critical component of civic life and as the central gathering place for information is being usurped by the myriad and constantly evolving functionality of the Internet. It is apparent that the implications of this change in the way people satisfy their need for information for the most trusted, venerable institutions of journalism — newspapers — are not good.

As papers die, bureaus close and newsrooms are gutted, it is important for those of us who study and teach journalism to investigate ways for existing institutions to adapt with success, and to design new institutions capable of surviving the new business climate. The most trusted national newspapers are losing millions or tens of millions of dollars every month. In this climate, those of us who are presently sheltered in academia as students and professors have an obligation to search for solutions to the obvious problem: How can this profession be saved?

It has been said that journalism must adapt or die — in pursuit of successful adaptation I also propose a redefinition of what journalism is. In short, I broadly define the role of the journalist to encompass the any and all ways in which we can uncover truths that are hidden, help people make sense of an impossibly complicated world of information, and actively shape the development of the societies we live in without sacrificing our most important ethics.

The Press

Some 570 years after Gutenberg’s invention, it is hard to understate the impact of the printing press on the course of human history. Literacy, while growing, was still largely limited to the clergy, the nobility and the nascent middle class. News spread, when it spread at all, by letter, courier or word of mouth. That we have been able to advance in all these areas to achieve the comparatively literate, secular and open societies that characterize the western world today is at least partially the result of five centuries of increasingly inexpensive access to information, according to Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, the author of “The Printing Press as an Agent of Change.”

The period of history stretching from 1440 to the recent past — which gave us modern democracy, the institutions of the press and the practice of journalism as we understand it today — is over. As the cost of distributing information approaches zero, the business models that support newspapers lose viability.

A word, before I continue, about optimism. The explosive growth of public access to the Internet more or less began in 1996, a mere 13 years ago. Thirteen years after Gutenberg’s invention, most Europeans were still ruled by divine right monarchs, the church was the single most powerful institution in the western world and the Modern Age as we understand it now was just being born.

We are alive at a critical turning point in human history, and the consequences of developments we have seen in communications, culture and political participation in the last 13 years will not be thoroughly understood until long after we are all dead. The familiar institutions of the past are not just at serious risk, they are all but guaranteed to fail. Those that survive will be transformed by developments we can hardly imagine. In this historical context, our obligation as a profession is not to the institutions that would once have employed us, it is to re-imagine and renew function: Informing the people through the uncovering and dissemination of the news.

The Model Paper

While I acknowledge that no two newspapers have ever put out exactly the same product, broad commonalities between papers exist. A generalization of the newspaper product is a useful starting point in determining what changes must be made to preserve its function, as opposed to its form.

The content of a model newspaper can be divided into three parts. First of these is the news — encompassing reportage of political and business developments, crime, society, arts, entertainment and sports. Diversity in tone of language, editorial intent and standards of reporting abound in this area, but it is safe to say that when published by a reputable institution the news is expected to be fair to its subjects, timely in its publication and relevant to the interests of the reader.

The second part is opinion, which is generally segregated from news by its placement on a separate page and by the explicit adoption and promotion of a point of view. Op/ed pages are populated by the writings of editors and reporters who have decided that a given issue is important enough to leave their nominally objective third-person reporting behind and address a matter directly, as well as distinguished guest writers and columnists with experience in the area they address. It is also the place where selected and edited feedback from people in the news and readers themselves is printed, lending a democratic air to the page — its presence in the paper suggests that people who disagree with the either the reporters’ interpretations of the news or the positions of the editorial staff have a place where their views will be given a fair hearing.

The informational function of the news component is to make the paper indispensable to its target audience by actively finding, reporting and publishing stories that have not yet entered the public discussion and by following up on developments in stories that have been reported. In this way, the news staff makes the paper useful to its readers by providing a competitive advantage in understanding events that affect their lives. By keeping readers informed about what is going on in the world, the news helps to shape their own worldviews and decide how to act and what to believe.

The informational function of the opinion component, in contrast, is to identify the positions of the editorial staff so that they are transparently available to the reader. Readers understand that people who construct and edit stories in the context of their subjective experience staff the newspaper. The op/ed pages serve not just to persuade readers to adopt a particular idea or viewpoint, but also to lay out the worldview of the people who produce the news so that their views and biases, based on subjective experience, can be identified and weighed by the reader as well.

The third informational component of the newspaper is commercial content, specifically, advertisements. Newspapers traditionally leverage people’s need to keep informed about the developments of the day and the resulting demand for their product to lease space on the page to commercial or political interests. They also allow people and businesses to advertise goods and services, or their need for the goods and services of others in the classified section. The classifieds function as a sort of community bulletin board, increasing papers’ utility to their readers and generating revenue at the same time.

When combined, these diverse streams of advertising revenue formerly allowed papers to offset overhead costs and reduce the price of entry for both subscribers and those who would buy the paper from a newsstand, broadening the papers’ reach and enhancing the effectiveness and value of the ads. Running a good paper involved maintaining a balance between paid advertisements, news and editorial content that readers would find palatable for the price. Organizational firewalls between the business and editorial sides of the institutions kept readers and staff from doubting the integrity of the news itself and the independence of the editorial component. According to Herbert Lee Williams, this balance between commercial and editorial content, and the positive feedback relationship between advertising and price of entry were key to the business model that kept newspapers afloat for generations.

The Problem with the Model

The grim fact of the situation is that all three of the informational components have been devalued, replaced, or both, by the widespread access to the Internet.

The news component is perhaps the most troublesome, as it can be argued that newspapers have done the most serious damage to their product themselves by giving it away online. The fact remains, however, that even in the heyday of the paper subscription model, revenues from reader payments for subscriptions and newsstand copies were never enough to support the overhead-intensive reporting and editing process that generates the best news coverage.

While the potential for monetization of most news content is still up for debate, the opinion component, by contrast, has been inherently devalued. While professional journalists generally have better access to sources, more time and money to develop news stories, and better communication skills with which to disseminate them than the average Internet user, no one has a monopoly on opinion. Where once readers would look to the opinion page of the newspaper for informed, persuasive arguments from professionals writing in their fields, including journalists, now anyone and everyone who wants to be heard can be. The effect of this situation has been magnified by the advent of social networking — the collection of interrelated free networks within which people can share information easily and transparently. With e-mail, blogs, social networking and search results that take into account the relevance of pages by analyzing their place in the network of links, the Internet has become a true market of ideas, where the community collectively decides which opinions they want to believe by registering their endorsements in a wide variety of ways.

Given these facts, attempts to put opinion content behind a pay wall seem uniquely misguided. Not only does doing so betray one of the main informational functions of the traditional opinion page — the laying out of the worldview and inclinations of the editorial staff — it is fundamentally ineffective as both an incentive for readers to pay for online access and as a persuasive tool. When everyone with an opinion, qualified or not, can be heard, and the community decides collectively through links, recommendations and other communication which opinions have the most merit, there is absolutely no benefit for news organizations in hiding their opinion component behind a wall.

With the value of the pay wall approach as a method for funding the news and opinion functions of the newspaper questionable at best, newspapers are beginning to investigate other sources of revenue. While many different ideas have been proposed, it seems likely that papers will have to continuously develop novel ways to generate income directly in order to create a diverse revenue stream from which to operate.

In-person events are a very promising source of revenue that some organizations and individual journalists are beginning to take advantage of. Examples include speaking and television appearance fees for reporters and the explicit sponsoring of and charging for events and conferences. These events have the potential to be a big part of the puzzle, especially for publications with a professional audience, but it is an incomplete approach to generating revenues directly.

Another approach is the direct sale of real goods to readers. In lieu of a newspaper, it is realistic to consider what other tangible products an news organization might sell to support its continued operation. Leveraging the less “newsy” components of the publication — meaning those sections without absolutely critical civic value such as arts, sports, entertainment, food, product reviews, etc. — to either send readers to online storefronts where they can make purchases relevant to the topic at hand (i.e. theater tickets, an exotic food item, a new gadget) and arrange with online retailers to take a cut of the proceeds in exchange for this traffic, or selling items to readers directly, are avenues worthy of exploration, though they raise legitimate questions about the potential influence on coverage.

That said, all of the potential sources of revenue outlined above — pay walls, events and appearances, and the sale of real goods — are essentially mitigating tactics for newspapers facing a decline in circulation. Even if they meet with success, they would not generate enough revenue to support the newsroom as we know it. They do not address the single biggest problem for newspapers generated by the new conditions of the market, the devaluation of commercial content — that is, the collapse of advertising.

While it is simply too early in the current recession to answer definitively the question of why this is the case, it seems apparent that several factors contribute, including, most notably, the nationwide decline in circulation.

The downward progress of overall circulation numbers tracks roughly with the rise of access to the Internet among the population as a whole. Over the last thirteen years, access to the Internet has become simultaneously cheaper and faster and free online news content has increased in both quality and quantity. In addition, the means of access, which was previously limited to expensive, bulky desktop computers, now include a diversity of increasingly cheap and easy-to-use platforms, especially mobile platforms, a trend that is certain to continue.

Younger people in particular increasingly decline to subscribe to newspapers. Fundamentally, the reason is that newspapers are no longer essential to living an informed life. Their news is generally available for free, their opinions swim in an endless sea of other opinions and are thus devalued, and the function once performed by the classified section has been replaced by a litany of online services that are at once more timely, broader in scope, and easier to access than the daily paper.

The recession has magnified all of these factors. When advertising budgets are cut, advertisers look for less expensive ways to promote their products. When circulation and advertising revenues both drop, papers fail.

The Coming Gap

In light of these facts, it is apparent that we are facing a gap period in which many more newspapers will fail before the economy recovers and a diversity of alternate institutions with business models based exclusively on electronic dissemination of the news can rise to replace them.

What those models might be, of course, is still an item of speculation and debate, but a few options readily present themselves. These include variations on the non-profit model, supported by foundation grants, government subsidy or charitable donations and membership, the for-profit model, supported by diversified revenue streams including online advertising and sales of real goods and services and any number of models with aspects of both.

While we re-evaluate what successful business models for journalism might be in the future, it is critically important that we also take another look at what our ideas of what constitutes journalism have become, and how they may need to change to fit new conditions. That different ethics and editorial intents apply to different media is apparent: Just compare the dominant ideal of objectivity as practiced on most cable news shows to that practiced in most newspaper newsrooms. A new era in history with new media calls for a diversity of ethical guidelines and approaches to creating the news that must be tested by both the market and the crowd before we will know what works and what does not. To quote journalism blogger and former newspaper editor Gina Chen, “the product isn’t news; it’s helping readers make sense of their world in every way possible.”

First, as people are swamped by an overwhelming tide of potentially relevant information, services that help consumers make better choices about what information to give their attention, or save consumers time by aggregating information dynamically in a way that makes sense given their particular needs, are almost certain to succeed.

Second, forget about the kind of wall between professional journalists and others that existed in the days of expensive access to publishing tools. If someone acts as a journalist — uncovering and revealing to the public new truths that are timely, relevant, and essential to understanding the world — they are practicing journalism, and should be treated as such.

Third, in addition to teaching traditional skills that are still essential, such as reporting, writing, photography and design, the educational institutions that train journalists should train them in the creation and use of new publishing platforms, and require them to specialize in an area of expertise outside of the field such as a physical, social or applied science. Many journalists are going to have to find ways to make a living other than by practicing traditional journalism, at least for a while, but the skills, discipline and critical thinking capacity developed by the practice will help new graduates succeed in whatever they might decide to do.

It must also be noted that the trend in media is towards increasing fragmentation and specialization, and the news sites that do have successful pay walls are generally targeted to relatively small interest groups. A background in journalism with a specialty in a particular field of endeavor will prepare graduates to start the blogs, aggregators and news sites that will likely blossom into sustainable businesses down the road.

By diversifying the fields in which we work, broadening the scope of our profession to include all those who practice it, and constantly working to test new ideas, journalists can adapt to the gap years and prepare the ground for those to come. By building new sites that provide novel and essential functionality, by specializing in diverse fields of research to uncover different kinds of news and by practicing ethical journalism, broadly defined, whether currently employed as journalists or not, journalists will found the institutions that will be regarded as indispensable in the future.

Newspapers such as they are may be doomed, but their function will still need to be performed when they are gone, and some set of new institutions will replace them. It’s up to us to determine what that will be.