Reporting lives even if newspapers don't

If Rick is anything like me, it's not up to us. It's up to the brass that makes the big money. Our jobs are to write and edit. And then drink and yammer on about sports on message boards.

 

Except, Mustang, that the "brass that makes the big money" isn't doing that any longer. Writing, reporting and editing simply aren't enough any longer for journalists to continue in their profession. If you can get someone to pay for you to do just that, great. Congratulations.

You're a rare exception to the rule.

 

Your entire "context" is a reinterpretation of history based around bending it in favor of newspapers.

Newspapers are not new to the party, and they have not been slow to integrate on the web. The mere fact that they are only partially involved in the latest flavor of the month web sites is not proof to the contrary. Before Twitter and Facebook, there was Go.com. Facebook and Twitter are not the first wildly popular internet sites to find out that they can't afford to provide it for free forever, and when the venture capital runs out, someone else will come along to provide it for free because they think they'll be different.

Facebook and Twitter and newspapers are all facing the same basic problem that the web has been facing since the mid-1990s: Internet advertising is not very lucrative. If you count on content produced by volunteers to draw eyes, then you can just squeak out a profit over your development and bandwidth costs, but the proof that nobody can make money paying content-producers on an ad-revenue based model is the fact that they've been trying for 15 years now and failing consistently.

And meanwhile, that ignores the point that the gains made in online advertising are at the expense of print advertising. You acknowledge that online revenue was never expected to eclipse print revenue, and on that we agree, but the second half of that equation that you are ignoring is that the existence of online ad revenue is what has permanently crippled print revenue. And as mentioned, in 15 years nobody has come up with a content-production business model that can live without print revenue.

When the recession caused ad spending to go down 7% nationally, news industry ad revenue went down 25%. This is evidence of a broken business model, not an issue with the recession.

So yes, my argument essentially comes down to "nobody's done it yet." But the youngin's who insist "this time it's different" and the true believers who just find it too emotionally difficult to imagine a world without reporting as we know it are going to have to come up with a little more to convince me.

If someone has a new idea they want to try, feel free to try it, but I haven't seen any new ideas. I've seen a bunch of recycled ideas from people who don't realize how insulting they are being to the intelligence of those who came before them when they say "But when *I* try it, it will work."

 

If you find someone to pay you to Twitter and edit video and provide mobile content, you'll be just as rare of an exception.

 

Rick,
This is a well-thought-out post. And, in-line with revenue numbers I've been privy to, with some exception.
The model is broken, or not adapting at a rate that would be survivable. The recession didn't cause this decline, only accelerated it. Without a tax or an online ad-rate redistribution scale rewarding the destination of a search, the problem will worsen.

 

This is related somehow, though not sure how exactly. But the Seattle P-I's online edition has sunk dramatically since the print edition went out of business. It's down 23 percent since last year. The Seattle Times, meanwhile, had 70 percent increase in a year. Print still drives the web, and more people than ever are reading papers - "no one reads this rag because of its liberal bias and because you hate our sports teams"! - but the money...figuring out the money remains the mystery.

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003964591

 

Rick, I'm not a youngin', I'm not reinterpreting anything and I'm certainly not arguing anything in favor of newspapers. They missed their best chance at the Web because they weren't willing to alter their business models.

Now they are shedding thousands of journalists because of it. I'm one of those who've been affected. For the record, I took a buyout, I wasn't laid off, and I see a better future for journalism outside of those crippled newsrooms.

I don't have any "emotionally difficult" issues imagining a world without reporting as "we know it." Kaufman's post was spot-on: Journalism and reporting aren't going away. The journalism profession is undergoing a vast transformation, and the very young Web platform that you've virtually given up on hasn't matured either editorially or financially. You make 15 years sound like a long time; but that's as old as the popular Web is. It's still a baby.

It's really easy to point to what hasn't worked and suggest that nothing will.

It's even easier still to assert all this and then add no new ideas of your own.

 

It being easy to say is not a mark against its accuracy. I'm going to call it a mark in its favor, actually.

It's also easy to say "it's still early, maybe things will work out." It's human nature to give in to the idea that something can always be done, whereas it's hard to admit that the battle is lost.

I conceded that you'll still have a few thousand professional reporters and a whole lot of amateuers out there. But to go from 60k paid professional reporters in organized, competent news organizations to that would be plenty for me to call it the death of reporting, even if there's a few who want to point out that it still exists in that scenario.

Newspapers were willing to alter their business model. Newspapers were *desperate* to alter their business model. But as much as we like to blast the suits, they aren't stupid and they aren't going to change to a business model that won't work, a category which covers every web-based idea thus far. Lots of people have ideas about how to attract eyes to the web, but nobody has come close to wringing money from those eyes, and I haven't seen a single person make a compelling case as to how that might change.

Kaufman's post was not spot on. It was, again, for the millionth time in the last year, a person making the argument that "reporting must go on even without newspapers" without providing any sort of blueprint or model of how it work.

 

Of course reporting will still be around after newspapers. I don't think anyone really disputes that.

Whether it will be reporting of the same caliber currently being done by print reporters, especially on the local level, I think is an open question.

Actually, I think in the long run journalism will be fine, things will balanace out, and we'll find a way to make money online. But by in the long run, I mean in ten or twenty years. I think the next five years are going to be an utter disaster for American journalism.

 

Kaufman's post was not spot on. It was, again, for the millionth time in the last year, a person making the argument that "reporting must go on even without newspapers" without providing any sort of blueprint or model of how it work.

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So what about your blueprint, Rick? You accuse Kaufman of not offering some tangible solutions.

What are yours?

 

I told you, there are none. 15 years of smart, hardworking, intelligent people across the Web (not just newspapers) have failed to produce a business model that can support paid content-creators on the web.

The smart thing to do in this environment, the blueprint, is to get out with as little damage as possible. Newspaper companies are doing this by slashing the product to grab what little profits they still can before shutting down. Individuals such as me are doing it by accepting that our current job in newspapers is our last and making plans for how to deal with that (For me, that means cutting my household expenses to the bare bone and piling up cash as fast as I can).

 

Maybe nothing can be done to save the vitality of newspapers -- if not some newspapers themselves. I would like to believe it's not too late for that. But I'm not sure.

But Rick, the profession isn't dying. It's going to be very rough for a while -- perhaps for the rest of my career. I'm resigned to that fact. There are so many ex-newsroom types like me who are starting their own sites with that understanding. There all kinds of methods being tried to finance this type of work, outside of advertising, that have barely begun.

One of my ex-colleagues who's started his own investigative reporting site says simply, "This is all jazz." And it is. It's all improvisation. We don't know how it's going to turn out, or when anything might turn a profit. But it's worth trying.

I'm sorry you don't share that view, but there are too many journalists, now freed from their newsrooms, who care too much to give up so easily.