Is there a future for newspapers?

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There were some good ideas posted on my first entry. Thanks! I’ll start on those soon, but there’s something I want to write about first.

McClatchy, a major newspaper company, cut 10 percent of its workforce yesterday. That’s about 1400 jobs, 123 of them in Charlotte. (I first found out by following The Charlotte Observer on Twitter, so I guess it’s turning out to be useful after all. I’m going to try del.icio.us next.) My second thought was of all the people who would suddenly find themselves out of work. Would that number include anyone from the bureau where I worked as an intern? What about the employees that I met through college? :/ My first thought, though, was a bit more selfish. How could I expect to be hired at a newspaper in the face of such widespread layoffs? Was this just a problem with McClatchy, or evidence of a more widespread trend?

I keep reading things about how print journalism is in decline. It was even in my college textbooks, though tinged with what could be seen as either hope or denial. If jobs aren’t being cut, pay often is. I feel like the starving artist — following my passion even when I know the chances of making much money from it are slim. Everyone seems to agree that what used to work for newspapers doesn’t work anymore, but no-one seems to know where to go from here.

Newspapers only make a fraction of their earnings from subscriber fees and newsstand sales. The real money comes from advertisers. But advertisers do take a look at circulation numbers,  and if the figures drop too low, they may decide that their money is better spent somewhere else. Magazines are more targeted than newspapers, so the advertising is more likely to reach its intended audience. Online ads are cheaper to take out than print ads, and they’re likely to be seen by more people.  And there’s always TV and radio, two forms of media that are still doing quite well.

But who am I to say anything about this? I don’t subscribe to any newspapers. (Actually, I just subscribed to the local daily, but only because someone at K-Mart gave me the hard sell. I might cancel.) I’m a little ashamed to admit that, as an aspiring print journalist. I do have electronic versions of a few papers e-mailed to a certain account, though.  There’s not much incentive for me to pay for the physical paper when I can get most of the content online for free.

Not only is online news free, it’s also fast, customized, and interactive. I can get only the news I want, when I want it, in practically any format. I remember reading an article on Slate a while ago called “Chronicle of the newspaper death foretold.” Jack Shafer makes the case that the newspaper industry was in trouble long before the Internet ever came around, but still identifies the Internet as its primary challenge. He also compares buying a newspaper to buying a roll of film or a physical CD — consumers must pay for what they don’t want in order to get what they do want. But now we only print the pictures from our digital camera that we choose to print, and we can choose which songs from a particular album we want to buy. It’s no wonder that we want our news the same way.

It’s not that the complete gestalt of local, state, national, and international news plus sports, comics, classified, opinion, and hints on fashion, home, entertainment, and food isn’t still useful. It is. But given a choice, and the economic means to make a choice, many buyers prefer to make an unbundled purchase. Unbundling the news they want from the news they don’t want is what the Web allows readers to do now.

Can the newspaper industry adapt enough to offer this kind of product? They’re already trying — most papers have set up Web sites where readers can pick and choose the content they want to see. Will newspaper subscriptions be more customizable in the future? Will it be possible, for example, to only subscribe to the sports, business, or lifestyle section?

I recently read a long article at the New Yorker’s Web site called “Out of Print: The death and life of the American newspaper.” Eric Alterman makes his points much more eloquently than I ever could in a summary, but there was one speculation that stood out to me — we may see the return of ultra-partisan publications, like this nation’s first newspapers. This is already happening online, on TV, and on the radio, so why not in print? This doesn’t sit quite right with me (neither the section-specific subscriptions nor the ultra-partisanship). I believe that sometimes what we want to know doesn’t always match perfectly with what we need to know, and a good news source should deliver both.

Also, newspapers could just take their operations completely online, if they learn how to make it profitable. I’m up for developing my computer and Internet skills in order to become an online-only journalist. But we’ll see where the industry goes… I’m trying to be optimistic.

So where are your favorite places to get the news? From TV, radio, certain Web sites, or the actual newspaper? What do you like about those places, and what do you dislike about others?

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Tags: journalism, media, newspapers