Media: The way newspapers used to be …
From a blog on The Courant.com:
One problem with newspapers — not just The Courant — is that they’re often a little a boring. They go for days and days without a “Holy S–t!” story on page one. There are ways to address this. One of them is to put the g-d paper together at night. If you’re a morning newspaper and there aren’t a hell of a lot of reporters and editors in the building at 11 p.m., something is wrong. The building should be damn near empty until 2 p.m. and full until 11. But somewhere a long the way, newspaper jobs gradually started to resemble other white collar jobs. They lost some of their romance and replaced it with comfort and security. We all wanted to go home to the suburbs, have a glass of wine, interact with our spouses and kids. Much better for our lives but probably not for newsgathering. (Meanwhile, cable news and the Internet actually tightened up the news cycles — people now expect to be updated fast.) If the news staff is going to be an elite strike force, it had better include a lot of workaholics and night owls.
I’ve told this story before: I was sitting my living room on the East Bluff on the night before Thanksgiving. I heard a noise and looked out and I saw a Journal Star delivery truck dropping bundles at the corner. It was 10:30 p.m. There wasn’t a speck of news in that newspaper that wasn’t two hours old. And most people wouldn’t read these newspapers until eight hours later. And this was before the explosion in online news.
In some ways, the above column is a call to arms to newspapers to be more timely and relevant. But in another way, it’s just nostalgic twaddle. Even if anyone follows his advice, it won’t help much.
Even if some reporter turned in a story, and it was edited and paginated in time to his the press by 11 p.m., that means a consumer who grabs the newspaper from his front porch at 6 a.m. is getting news that’s seven hours old. Compare this to the breaking news that is minutes old that he can find on his computer when he reads his email.
The very process of printing news on paper and hand-delivering it door-to-door is hopelessly antiquated and ridiculously slow.
All the “Holy S–t!” stories hit the Web first, and they are dissected, refuted, and analyzed to death before newspapers readers open their doors in the morning to pick up their paper from the porch.
And the people who buy the actual newspaper are subsidizing the cost of delivering the ads inside to their doorstep.
It can’t last. It won’t last. Print journalism is dying. The corpse just hasn’t fallen down yet.
July 7th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
Ya know, you’re usually a little too cynical (I think that’s the word I was going for) for my tastes, but I read you for articles just like this one. I didn’t really think about the newspapers being dropped off at 10:30pm. That’s just… weird. I imagined that there were some reporters who were there late, some came in early and they ran the presses around 10:30, not that they were DELIVERING at 10:30!
I still get my Journal-Star and read it eagerly most days (some mornings I’m just too busy), probably because it’s a long standing tradition among members of my family. I don’t want to see newspapers die, but if they’re running the presses and delivering them at 10:30pm the night before, that’s just not gonna fly.
Damn shame… maybe it’s just a romantic notion on my part, but newspapers are a great compliment to online and cable news. There’s just things like the special sections of the paper (YouPage, comics, advice columns, AtHome, Heartland, Faith & Values, etc) that would lose their special “thing” if they were only ran online.
July 7th, 2008 at 5:36 pm
Yeah, Billy has a point in the “breaking news” department. But newspapers offer more than just breaking news. They also offer analysis and in-depth reports on widely varied subjects, along with features like comics and puzzles. They educate and entertain. Something can be timely without being “breaking.” And it’s all possible because they have professional journalists whose full-time job is to investigate, uncover, research and report. You have to be able to pay those people, right? And if on-line ads can’t support one guy with a blog, how can they support an entire news organization? What’s the business model for that? I think reports of newspapers’ death have been greatly exaggerated.
July 7th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
I am nostalgic about a lot of things, including a newspaper that I could pick and read for hours because there was an hours worth of reading in it is one thing. I also miss watching the Cubs on broadcast television. I also miss comic books that cost a quarter.
Well, cable make THAT impossible.
And then the Internet came along and killed newspapers. But as much as I liked the feel of a newspaper in my hand, the VALUE of a newspaper isn’t paper and ink, it’s the WORDS on the page that is of value to me. When I pay $1 for a newspaper, I’m not paying for those words. I’m paying for the paper, the ink, the cost of putting the ink ON the paper and then delivering the newspaper to my door, or the newsbox or the convenience store where I bought it.
July 7th, 2008 at 5:45 pm
How about this analogy. Newspapers aren’t dying, they just have to evolve to fit the needs of “modern” readers.
It’s sort of like being a CPA or realtor. You have to have continuing ed to keep your talents & knowledge honed to represent your clients to the best of your ability. It’s the same story for the newspapers, I just seems like alot of newspapers aren’t realizing this soon enough. I’m from a small town a little north of here and a distant cousin owns the newspaper up there. I know that their thing against having a website is that it’s one more thing to maintain… but that’s the way things are going. It doesn’t seem to have affected the newspaper up home yet, but its time is coming.
If you want an example of a newspaper who ISN’T dying, look at the Stark County News, they started off as an online paper and they seem to be doing pretty well. Granted, their circulation is far smaller than PJS’s is, but they’re doing well so far as I can tell.
July 7th, 2008 at 5:49 pm
C.J.: All over the place, there are online-only media organizations that are far more than one guy with a blog. The reason ad revenue can’t support the “one-guy” site is becaus eone-guy can’t generate the content. Believe me, the staff of the journal star could never well put together a news site better and more timely than the paper version of the PJS.
So what’s stopping people from doing just that in cities like? These online-only would have to charge a small subscription fee because the ad revenue isn’t there yet. But they can’t because these soon-to-be-extinct dinosaurs are giving it away for free.
Newspapers need to adapt from companies whose business model is based on the scarcity of the printing press to one based on a news gathering model via the Web.
July 7th, 2008 at 7:33 pm
Maybe I’m a little too picky about this, but I don’t think its feasible for any community-oriented newspaper to go totally online just yet. What about older people who don’t have the internet at home? What about people who want actual clippings of their wedding, anniversary, graduation, kid’s softball tournament, etc. to put in their scrapbooks? What about people who want to read the paper on the bus, train, or at their kitchen table and don’t want to be chained to a computer while they read? What if the rising cost of electricity and other goods forces people to cut back or give up their internet service? (Although if they can’t afford $20 or $30 a month for internet they probably can’t afford $1.50 per day or $200 + per year for a newspaper subscription either). I do think home delivery will probably have to be abolished for most newspapers do to the rising cost of gas, and papers will have to be sold strictly at retail outlets.
July 7th, 2008 at 7:53 pm
I like print newspapers. I find it less than satisfactory to curl up to a laptop. I subscribe to the PJS and the Financial Times.
I only read 2 sections at most of the PJS. The first section is largely redundant because International and National news has already been printed elsewhere. They don’t generate their own national news articles. They are all reprints, oft times a couple days old. The Local News section I do read. I read the Homes section. Classifieds – garbage, Sports – garbage, Autos- garbage, advert inserts usually garbage unless I am looking for something.
July 7th, 2008 at 8:28 pm
Bookworm, your argument makes sense. Look at the Trib, they cut service to Peoria. I don’t know that papers will have to cut delivery, but they may have to start using some kind of a surcharge for home delivery or limit delivery to a certain radius from where the papers are printed/distributed from.
July 7th, 2008 at 9:29 pm
Here’s a concept that’s also dead at newspapers on the altar of 30-40 percent profits. Staff them. If you want to provide around-the-clock coverage, don’t rely on work-a-holics. Staff the bleeping thing. People are down on journalists, but newsrooms have been thinned past the bone by companies attempting to cut payroll in pursuit of preserving profits other industries have wet dreams about, making it darn near impossible for the devoted few who remain to do a good job as journalists.
July 7th, 2008 at 9:45 pm
Amen, Joel.
July 8th, 2008 at 2:18 am
Just to set things straight on the Thanksgiving paper: It has ALWAYS been a special case. In the “old days,” like 30 years ago, it sometimes had as many as seven or eight sections because of all the ads (not inserts). It had to go to press early because the entire press had to be used to produce the paper. You couldn’t produce entire papers on multiple press units.
Deadlines 25 years ago used to be as early as 8:40 off the composing room floor. Lately, they’ve been between 10 and 11, as I recall. That’s still earlier than normal deadlines. The increased number of inserts has partially offset the smaller number of sections and faster press in determining production time.
Normal deadlines HAVE gotten earlier over the past three decades — something that pisses off virtually everyone in the Journal Star newsroom. The sports department, in particular, hates early deadlines.
I never heard an explanation for them that I could buy. My personal, cynical, nightside copy desk suspicions have always been that earlier deadlines are more “convenient” for the production and distribution people. Well, I can’t remember anything “convenient” about our jobs on the copy desk. And it should be noted that the Journal Star is printing tens of thousands fewer copies than it did 30 years ago, and on a much faster press. So why do deadlines need to be earlier?
July 8th, 2008 at 2:30 am
Just so no one misunderstands, this sentence in my previous post refers to Thanksgiving deadlines: “Deadlines 25 years ago used to be as early as 8:40 off the composing room floor.”
July 8th, 2008 at 10:02 am
In the late 60s, the Journal Star’s night city editor worked until 1:30 a.m. and could be reached for a couple hours thereafter, the police reporter was there until 2 and the late person on the copy desk (usually the new guy) worked until 2:30. They could and did get late breaking stories into the paper after 2 a.m. Examples that come to mind include racial violence in 68-69, the shooting of Peoria Colunty Deputy Ray Espinoza in 1970 and the assassination of Robert Kennedy. Holiday papers were always different, a “combined edition” with early deadlines. although composing was suppposed to provide replate protection until 1 a.m. And that, sonny, was how buggy whips were made.
July 8th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
I personally got a late wire story in the paper at 2:45 a.m. It was about boats attacking oil platforms in the Persian Gulf. Must have been in the late ’80s.
The story was only in the late edition, which went to Peoria County. It was just a regular Sunday night/Monday morning. I told Jim Duncan, the one composing room guy left, that I wanted to go as late as possible. He would rather have gone home at 1:45 or 2, but he had at least a modicum of dedication to getting the latest news on the street. I put down OT, and nothing was said, positive or negative, about my actions the next day.