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 Life without Newspapers Are dailies dead?
Web readers of Newcity might notice that some of this story was first
published at Newcity.com. I am a lifelong newspaper junkie. Growing up, my dad always read the
newspaper, and when his dad was around, he read the newspaper. I
understood implicitly that grownup men read newspapers.
After school, I went to work for Goldman Sachs, where it was drilled
into the trainees that keeping up with news was a fundamental component
of success. I indulged, almost excessively. In my twenties, I
subscribed
to the daily editions of the Chicago Tribune, The Chicago Sun-Times,
the
New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. And, because I "covered"
Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa for my sales job, I subscribed to both
Milwaukee dailies, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and the Des Moines
Register. I think I personally took down a tree a day.
When I left Goldman, I symbolically quit my WSJ subscription, but
picked it up again a few years later. Over time, my addiction to
newspapers became as much a burden as a pleasure. Stacks would pile up,
and time would disappear as I plowed dutifully through every edition.
Finally, when the Sun-Times couldn't deliver consistently to my Loop
apartment, I dropped it. I dropped the New York Times to save time.
With
the advent of the Internet, and the incursion of email, I started
losing
even more time. Eventually I dropped the Journal, leaving only the
Tribune. Ironically, the Trib is my least favorite of the four, and for
years I subscribed to it over the Sun-Times only because its delivery
service was virtually flawless and, frankly, because it had the good
comics. Newspapers are like throwbacks to another time, with
"family-friendly" profanity-free copy, aw-shucks columns and Blondie
cartoons. Reading the newspaper is like limiting your television
watching to a steady stream of "Leave it to Beaver" reruns. I am sure
that for some segments of the population, perhaps for that mysterious
"Red State America" out there, this is a good thing. But for me, the
pleasure of reading comes from magazines and books.
I've been an early adopter of the Internet, and read dozens if not
hundreds of stories a month online. But I've done so in conjunction
with
my daily newspaper habit. Over the last year, I've grown more
pessimistic about the future of the print newspaper, a notion supported
by the growing consensus of countless pundits contemplating the
crashing
earnings and circulation figures flowing out of the once-mighty
emperors
of ink. For me, the proliferation of the wireless Internet has been the
lynchpin, as I've become addicted to perpetual connectivity and have
seen my lifestyle changing to reflect it. And I'm from the newspaper
generation; those behind me lack any allegiance to print.
I decided to go cold turkey for a month and give up print newspaper
subscriptions altogether--to try and get my daily news fix from the
web,
and see what happened. Day One
Although I look forward to a more varied news diet, and fully expect
to dramatically vary my menu as time progresses, I decide to start with
the familiar and head to Chicagotribune.com. After reading one of the
top news stories about Dick Cheney's wayward shotgun, I click on what
looks like big news on Lollapalooza and get exiled to a
login/registration page. I've already registered but, of course,
can't
remember which password I used, so I have to get it emailed, then
login,
then back to the home page to get to the story again. Not an auspicious
beginning.
I skim and scroll a lot, replacing the similar process of skimming
and scanning that I use with my newspaper. Many stories are just
headlines, and in most cases, I don't want to invest the time to click
and see if they are interesting. This is especially true of columnists,
since I don't have any particular favorites at the Tribune. In print,
I'd scan all the stories and perhaps read something I would not have
expected to, based on the headline and the lead paragraph.
Overall, I'm somewhat disoriented, despite the familiarity. I don't
really look at sports, and don't know where the celeb gossip that I
read
in print is.
One thing I observe today is that while the news is theoretically as
fresh as it can be, "fresh" news seems to be mixed in with older
stories, especially on the section pages. I see headlines to stories I
read in print Monday, or even Sunday. With print, you might not have
the
latest news, but you have a built-in sense for how fresh it is, and
make
mental adjustments. With the web, you rely on posting times, which you
usually have to click on a story to see, or you live with confusion.
For
example, Tom Skilling's weather forecast today projects a high of 42
and
a low of 32, but when you scroll down the page, the seven-day forecast
shows a high for today of 52 and a low of 37. Which is the most current
forecast? Is one just a keypunch error?
Another observation: with print, you have a somewhat defined
beginning and end, which helps contain the time you spend with the
news.
With the web, there is no such finiteness, allowing you to spend as
much
or as little time as you want. I fear that this will end up costing me
more, not less.
Suntimes.com immediately seems like a better-organized site--like a
print tabloid, it's more linear in its organization, allowing for more
methodical scanning of stories. It offers email editions, of which I
sign up for several. And quick access to columnists where, unlike the
Tribune, I do have favorites. Day Twelve
It's almost two weeks since I kicked the print newspaper habit and,
truthfully, I'm not feeling any pain, or any more optimistic for the
future of the daily newspaper. I still spend as much or more time
reading news in the morning, but my consumption has changed
fundamentally. I do feel a tad disoriented, like a brand-new vegetarian
might feel after a lifetime of carnivorous behavior.
I've already settled into a routine. I start every morning with the
New York Times, thanks to their email service. They're in my box long
before I get started around 6:30am; the Sun-Times email usually arrives
after I've finished. So I now take all of my national and
international
news from the NY Times, as well as most of my cultural coverage. After
perusing Doonesbury, Dilbert and Boondocks online, I turn to the
Sun-Times for local news and columns. I like the linear organization of
the Sun-Times site; it makes for simple and (seemingly) complete
navigation. Columnists are listed next to the main news well by name,
but only listed if they have a fresh column that day. I read Feder,
DeRogatis, Lazare and Zwecker whenever they're posting. From there I
head to the Tribune and see what local news they've covered that the
Sun-Times didn't have; usually not much. I check the weather on the
Tribune, which is sometimes all I read on the site. Organized a bit
like
its broadsheet big brother, the Trib's site doesn't offer especially
friendly navigation. Things I would always read in print--Blair Kamin,
local arts and entertainment coverage, takes some effort to find.
I'm a headline reader now. Head and subhead are often enough to get
the gist of the story. With print I would likely have scanned the first
paragraph at the very least, and often got sucked into the whole story.
Now that manual (click) commitment and the time it takes to load the
page puts the burden on the headline package to really convince me. I
usually just move on. The importance of the headline and teaser are
paramount to web news, yet so many stories are given ambiguous one-line
treatment that offers the reader no real information. And the craft of
writing these little morsels is essential: I get the Salon newsletter
every morning with the New York Times, but, as lively as the writing is
in the publication, I find little to click through to from the
newsletter.
So what's missing? I sometimes feel a lack of completion; that, in
spite of the time I'm spending, there is important news I would have
read before that I do not read now. And I often take note, as I walk by
the newspaper box on the way to the train, of the modulation in type
size of the very headline I've earlier read online. When the headline
is
especially big and bold, the story takes on more importance. That's a
role editors play, using modulation to help readers prioritize the
reams
of information we're getting. And one they're not playing the same
way
on the web. Day Thirty-One
Today my month-long "vacation stop" ends, and there is my
newspaper, like clockwork, outside my door. I find it easy to return to
my routine, with my chair, my paper, my coffee. But something has
changed. I've grown accustomed to a new manner of digesting news, and
especially fond of keeping up with the Sun-Times. And I'm reading the
New York Times again, and realizing how much I missed it.
At the suggestion of a Tribune editor a couple of weeks back, I
signed up for their email newsletter, Daywatch. It's a fine product,
with its own byline for the veteran Charlie Meyerson, but it has two
drawbacks: 1) you have to be a paid Tribune subscriber to get it and 2)
it comes out midday rather than early morning.
In fact, it's possibly too late for the Tribune with me. Habits have
already been formed online. I still have my chair and my coffee, but
now
it's the laptop. And, of course, all the news sources in the world, a
mere click away. The web is a news junkie's heaven--and hell.
And my print subscription? I cancel it, effective at the end of the
month. When I call, the friendly customer-service rep warns me that
I'll
lose the perk of my email subscriptions. I can't help but think that
it
will actually be their loss. A few years back, I spent many hours on the Internet conference
circuit, spending time with the "pure" new media types and the online
newspaper folks alike. The newspaper guys were addicted to the mantra
that newspapers weren't going anywhere until you could take your
computer to the bathroom with you. It was disheartening on two levels;
one, that it seemed to place so much value emphasis on the physical
character of the medium, and it did not take a crystal ball to
visualize
a portable computing future, which was well underway; and two, that it
connected its value to bathroom diversion. Fortunately, and
unfortunately, you do not hear this argument anymore.
In fact, it is the newspaper, especially in the broadsheet format
like the Tribune, that now suffers from an unwieldy format. So much so
that the "quality" newspapers in London have made the revolutionary
migration to tabloid, a development many foresee in the United States
as
well. Self-government depends on continuous civic conversation, which in
turn depends on people having a common vocabulary. Without a shared
sense of what the problems are, there's little hope of finding
solutions. That shared middle--a place where people basically agree
about the facts and the issues, even if they differ over what to do
about them--is where we believe our responsibilities as newspaper
owners
lie. Pruitt's point is that the value of the mass media is (or more likely
was) simply its mass. I don't know whether he's right, anymore than I
know whether my life in whole is much better since the Internet changed
everything. I just know that it changed everything. Halftone Clarity A few notions about the future of newspapers online, some large and
some very small, from a newspaper junkie gone cold turkey: Some newspapers will still be printed for a very long
time. Newspapers that survive in print will be the nationals--the
New
York Times and USA Today--and the specialties: Wall Street Journal for
finance, Washington Post for politics, the LA Times for Hollywood.
Sounds like Britain, with all its national dailies, doesn't it? In
addition to broadsheets converting to tabloid format, national tabs
might emerge at the "lower end." Newspapers will survive, and thrive, on the web, but in different
ways and at different scales. Like the shrinking department stores
who saw market share dwindle once they joined the specialty stores at
the mall, so too will specialty web sites carve away key revenue
segments (like Craigslist is doing with classifieds). Daily newspapers
today are very big companies, and like big ships, they don't change
course very rapidly. Those classified ads that Craig Newmark and Co.
have taken away might make more sense on the Internet and the
advertisers certainly appreciate getting them for free, but their
revenue used to pay a lot of journalist salaries. The revenue
underpinnings of print newspapers are complex structures that have
evolved over decades, yet are eroding over months. Consequently,
newspaper companies are likely to become either much smaller and more
specialized or much more diversified at the corporate level if they are
to survive. Like the TV networks these past two decades who saw
once-astonishing market penetration dwindle but revenues soar, the
newspapers' proportionate scale in a rapidly fracturing media world
will
still offer advertising efficiencies to larger entities seeking a
"mass" if less demographically attractive audience. Formatting traditions will continue to evolve as the world gets
"flatter." Unlike newspapers today, which deliver content in a
three-dimensional space--the height and width of the page multiplied by
the number of pages--the Internet works best in two dimensions. That
is,
in spite of near-infinite depth, we enter a story through a headline
either emailed, sitting on a home page or turning up in a search
engine.
Headline writing, especially, will evolve as an art form into a mix of
wordplay and punchy digest writing. As newspapers shrink, they might get personality back. Before
World War II, newspapers were the domain of larger-than-life press
barons like William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Pulitzer and Chicago's own
Colonel McCormick. Many were relentless and even unscrupulous in their
pursuit of stories, of circulation and of profits, and they unabashedly
had personalities that matched their owners. As the organizations grew
and founders passed on ownership to often-disconnected heirs or public
shareholders, the professional journalist came of age. Many of the
changes that era brought were for the greater good, and journalism
reached its zenith when it helped bring down the corrupt presidency of
Richard Nixon. But the cautious commitment to "family values" in the
newspaper, matched with an unrealistic ideal of objectivity, turned the
professional newspaper into a rather bland, soulless thing. Magazines,
whether glossies or alternative weeklies on newsprint like Newcity and
the Reader, stepped into that void, establishing more intimate, more
committed relationships with their audiences. Online, newspapers will
give up the advantages gained in the postwar era; advantages of scale
and subscriber inertia. Online, brand loyalty is a frictionless click
away. ONLINE ONLY: Read the story in its two earlier online parts: Life Without
Newspapers, Part 1 Life Without
Newspapers, Part 2
Also by Brian Hieggelke Life without Newspapers
Designer Toothpaste?
Life without Newspapers
Requiem for a Dream
Hot Dish
Costume conundrums
Fan fare for the Common Man
Ticket-Miser
Car Free
Tip of the Week
Tip of the Week
Osteria via Stato
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