The Seattle Post-Intelligencer with a circulation similar to that of The Australian or the Adelaide Advertiser ceased publication this week. It is now a purely on-line publication.
Do not panic. It is not totally the case of the internet swallowing paper. There is another morning paper in Seattle, population 600,000, which will pick up the slack.
Nonetheless, it is part of a trend where split advertising dollars – between online and paper – means that cities like Seattle (and maybe Melbourne and even Sydney) cannot support two morning newspapers.
The big questions for a liberal democratic society are will enough of print survive the economic onslaught of the internet and if not will internet-only delivery of journalism be an effective substitute for the paper-delivered journalism that has served western democracy so valiantly (if sometimes in a flawed way) for several hundred years.
All the stats tell us that advertising revenue for print are static or falling, but it is still big – around $4 billion in the $12 billion market. Revenues for internet advertising are rising – maybe $2 billion next year. Trouble is, only a quarter or less of internet revenue supports independent journalism on news sites – the rest is on single-issue or sectoral sites.
The money to support independent journalism is leaching. Australian democracy needs independent print journalism with a commercial under-pinning. It has served us well.
To date, the big print organisations have been fairly ambivalent about the internet. It has been seen as a rival rather than an ally. Free news on the net has been seen as a threat to circulations, and internet sites offering free classifieds for cars, jobs and houses have been seen as a direct threat to revenue. And they are, too.
It means the funding for journalism is under threat. What is to be done?
My journalist colleagues will be outraged about what I am about to suggest, but it may be that the major newspaper groups have to reorganise their editorial sections, lest their individual newspapers get picked off one by one like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
It may be that newspaper groups in Australia and North America have to have core national desks of politics, business and sport whose journalists file to all the papers and websites of the group. They could have central desks for what I call (pardon the language) pap and crap – motoring, food and wine, gizmos, travel and the like.
They could then have resources left over to develop significant national rounds which are not as well covered as they should be – law, medicine, science and so on.
Each newspaper and major city news-site would then have a core of local journalists who might be better resourced than now to produce quality news and investigative reporting in their communities.
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer website on its own hopes to support 25 journalists in a city of 600,000. It will remain Seattle’s oldest continuous business.
Despite what has happened in Seattle, I think papers will survive for some time to come because they offer something different from internet news sites. That difference is not well understood. There are pluses and minuses of print and internet news.
The glory of print for readers is: no need for expensive technology; familiarity with people over 30; readability and portability. But more importantly a newspaper is a journalistic statement to readers which says: this is the summary of the important events of the past 24 hours which skilled people have selected and ordered for you. Within it you will find all you need. And obviously you can select within it yourself.
It is a service that the AB market will happily pay several hundred dollars a year for, or more. But make sure it is quality stuff.
Print also brings in cover-price revenue and revenue from display ads from people who are anxious to promote their wares to an audience of literate well-heeled people who are willing to pay several hundred dollars a year for the service of news selection.
The glory of on-line journalism is cheap to set up a website and to distribute the journalism. It can include video, pictures and sound.
The huge cost savings in not having to run a press or (in the above model) run separate national news, sport and finance desks means there would be enough money to support quality local journalism.
Critically, established newspapers have to recognise the strength of internet news. It is not just paper on line. It has its own strengths which should attract its own advertisers and readers.
Some of its strengths are:
There is no need to cut stories to a hole between adverts (losing content). You can link to related past and present stories so readers do not have to scurry through old papers. The comments on a given article are attached to it. Stories and comments can be updated (even corrected) instantly.
Most importantly, the net provides a genuine convergence. You can see relevant video, hear important sound combined with a thousand words or more of analysis. This is a new medium, not a conglomeration of the old. The video is not just meaningless movement to fill the enws hole with something other than a talking head with the “talent” – some hapless Minister or industry spokesman – wandering along a corridor, walking through a the door and then aimlessly turning pages of an irrelevant book or tapping a keyboard. Online the video can be short and pertinent and combined with several thousand words of analysis – radio and TV cannot deliver this.
The net’s advertising strength is obvious – you sort your jobs, houses and cars in whatever way you like – suburb, price, model or other attribute which is important to you.
Its weakness is lack of portability and lack of readability – we love to read black ink on white paper.
Another weakness is that it skews the news to the timely (what happened a few minutes ago) and the unusual (“most viewed” buttons drive news values) instead of emphasising news of importance and consequence.
The lesson from Seattle is that there is no god-given right for publications to continue as is indefinitely. Those that do not adapt die and if enough do not adapt the species becomes extinct.