This spring will mark a sad milestone at our home.
We're ending our newspaper subscription.
I was trained as a newsman. While a magazine major I took most of the newspaper courses at Medill. The idea of starting the day without a paper seems strange to me.
But for the last several years I have been the one lobbying to end it. My dear wife liked the comics. After merging its two editions in 2001 the Atlanta Journal-Constitution had two full pages of comics, and she enjoyed nothing more at the end of a hard day of work than relaxing with them.
This week the AJC announced it was "improving" its comics. It was going to color reproduction. But to "pay" for the "upgrade" it was killing about half the strips.
This, for my wife, was the last straw. She has finally agreed with me that the need for a daily newspaper is over.
Obviously many people feel the same way. In 2001 the AJC offered home delivery statewide. Then it shrank back to the Atlanta metro, and this week shrank further, to just the city and its nearest suburbs.
Other papers are in similar straits. After years of delivering 30 percent returns on equity by squeezing salaries and other costs, newspaper customers have awoken to the fact that we can live quite well without them. The Detroit papers are eliminating all home delivery except for weekends. Other metros are going to go dark this year — they will become paperless.
There's no news there anymore. Even state and local headlines are readily available on both newspaper and TV web sites. Sports have moved entirely to TV, as has entertainment. The ads have practically disappeared along with the stores those ads were for. Department stores, gone. Car dealers, gone. Real estate agents, gone. And if you need classifieds there is Craigslist.
Could this have been prevented? Yes.
I have been writing, here and elsewhere, for a decade and a half what I was first taught at Medill, that the job of journalism is to organize and advocate an industry, area or lifestyle. Notice the key word there?
Organize.
The newspapers decided long ago that they would only organize their own advertisers and their own readers, thank you, that the rest of the market was too much work for them. So they slowly circled the drain and now they're going in. Good.
The opportunity, however, remains open. A company with the technical chops to build a good online city directory, to give every shop and individual in that city their own page, to populate the pages of non-advertisers with links to whatever is out there on them (including maps), and only after building community to build traffic and business for those who will pay can still make money.
Google could do this through local editions. So, too, could Yahoo or Microsoft. The existing directory players could have, but like the newspaper people declined because they didn't know what their business was.
You build advocacy on top of organization, not underneath it. If you're not providing organization you can't provide context. An online newspaper that isn't building a directory is no better than a blog. And not very different.
Dana, I have to admit: you continue to impress me. Medill has sustained a reputation beyond borders. (The link is now medill.northwestern.edu/).
You offer the one solution — actual, local reporting — that newspapers have long left. For ten years I had a job that flew me to a different state every week and I noticed a common thread. Local papers ran poor copies of national stories and AP content. Worse, their editorial boards were non-existent, instead choosing to run nationally syndicated (almost exclusively) conservative columnists to rail about such important issues as Clinton’s penis and school prayer. The rest of its content was concentrated on the police blotter reports.
How much more interesting and engaging for the community would it have been to invite home grown reporters and editorial writers in a rotation of their expertise? That would NEVER work!
How’d those columns of Robert Novak, Jonah Goldberg, and Maureen Dowd work out for you?
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ESPN’s daily sports talk shows are often populated with newspaper sportswriters, many of whom haven’t worked for a newspaper in over a year. Jim Rome asked last week how two of his guests were hanging on. The guy from the Detroit Free Press said they’re only printing three days a week, and the other guy from the Pasadena Sun said that his paper has no print edition and its local news is outsourced to India. No joke, the videos of town meetings are streamed to India. Others are lucky to get on with such online sites as SI or fanhouse.com.