Are Newspapers Facing an Even More Bleak Future?
April 14, 2011
I heard a recent This Week in Law discussion about pay walls. The observations were interesting, but the juicy bits were the ways to get around pay walls. Interesting because most of those offering ideas were either “real” lawyers or aspiring lawyers. In a Digital Journal write up called “Future of Media Preview: A Q&A with the National Post’s Chris Boutet” some of the comments left me with a sense that the future of certain newspapers (digital and paper) was in doubt.
According to Boutet, in order to be an effective journalist today you must have fearlessness and above and beyond that a strong sense of adaptability and curiosity as well as a willingness to take risks and experiment as traits suitable to burgeoning journalists because they must constantly be willing to accept the changing platforms of new media in order to connect with readers.
Journalism is an ever changing chameleon and some print publications in Canada are going from the “print first” to a “media first” approach to putting together their newspaper. In the media first approach you build a strong online paper and create your print publication around that, the print should enhance and increase the focus of the online source. Boutet concedes that this is a bold strategy but it frees up space in the paper for more commentary, analysis and feature pieces instead of “breaking” news.
One passage caught my attention and probably the attention of non technical journalists:
Some of the best online news organizations are where they are today because they embraced a more agile, startup-like approach to their product development. Experimentation and innovation is key as the industry forays deeper into the digital space and we learn better ways to reach and serve our readers. Top-down, boardroom-style direction can’t react quickly enough to the ever-changing landscape. Building a product system around small, independent teams of reporters, editors, designers and developers is an excellent way to encourage creative thinking and speed up the implementation/evaluation cycle. Also, bring more developers into your newsroom. You really can’t have too many.
Okay, I wonder how the non technical journalists perceive this suggestion. Experimentation is the name of the game for Boutet. He has experimented with plugging articles via Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Tumblr.
My question is this, if newspapers are to go “truly digital” and papers are to become a novelty item, how will they solve the problem of advertising dollars? How can they make it more profitable for companies to advertise on the web unless they can promise that they will have the same number of people viewing their ads? For example, The Courier Journal in Louisville, Kentucky has a daily readership of more than half a million people Monday through Saturday and more than 600,000 on Sunday, that does not count residual readership. The problem is that the newspaper is a shadow of its former self when the daily was owned by the Binghams. Quality, not profit, was important to the Binghams. Now I am not sure what is important for the CJ. Certainly not search in my opinion.
How can a paper ever promise companies that online advertising will exceed that? Right now it won’t and I wouldn’t bet my retirement on digital newspapers becoming widespread and traditional newspapers fading out any time soon.
Leslie Radcliffe, April 14, 2011
Freebie unlike the daily print Courier Journal
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