Online Technology March 2000
Newspapers need to
find a niche (...again)
By Barry Schaeffer
Early newspapers prospered because they did one thing very well: they informed people about what was going on around them.
Later, they became financially comfortable because they learned to do some other things that buyers and sellers found attractive. Technology helped by making size, weight and volume less costly to deal with. Life was good.
Since the 1950s, however, newspapers have seen some of that comfort eroded by competitors who could do some of the same things as well as newspapers without spending as much money doing it. Adding insult to injury, technology has increasingly allowed these newcomers to disconnect the revenue and profit plums from the expensive stuff which happened to be the newspapers' raison d'etre.
What might have seemed like a final blow fell when some competitors actually began offering a version of newspapers' core product directly to consumers via the new electronic medium know as the Internet. Life looked bleak.
Newspapers tried several approaches to deal with this erosion: banding together in hopes that size might still act as a trump card (it doesn't); hoping to meet the newcomers on their own turf with completely detached electronic services (they didn't); and, most recently and successfully, setting up Web sites to offer portions of their core product in a more nimble way.
But local sites can't fully replace what the traditional newspaper editions are losing on -- in some cases, they even compete with themselves. Life is complicated and confusing; not a good thing if you're trying to make business decisions.
So what to do? There may be a message in the chronology above; easy to miss if you don't look carefully, but important enough to dig for. Basically it's this: Newspapers have done best when they stayed close to their original product -- news and information.
That newspapers haven't done well recently may be as much due to their slide toward political correctness as to competition from the Internet. So here we are in 2000 and newspapers must decide, before long, what their long-term strategy will be for the new electronic age. A couple of thoughts might be worth considering. While many would urge that newspapers reinvent themselves as electronic media outlets, a more conservative approach may be the correct one.
Consider the following:
However much they might try, newspapers cannot become pure "dot-coms" unless they are willing to completely give up their heritage and way of life. With startup money easy to get, technology a commodity, and their overhead structure heavy with brick and mortar, newspapers won't compete successfully on the newcomers' terms.
Perhaps newspapers must instead assume, as their forebears did, that an informed populace is important to our future and that, at some level, the nation will be willing to pay a fair price for the privilege of having good information about their community, nation and world. That may sound like a stretch, but history would argue that if it isn't true, we may not have long to exist as a free people.
Newspapers were once the source of tough, no-nonsense reporting that didn't care much about celebrity and even less about what the ruling elite thought of them. A few still are and are making money because of it. When was the last time you saw Wall Street Journal mince a word, about anything?
So, while their forays into the world of the Web are probably a good thing up to a point, newspapers' future may be determined more by their ability to rekindle the kind of newspapering that made them a critical part of a free democracy, and for which many readers are starved in today's "happy news" media world. Admittedly, that's a scary prospect, but it is not without evidence to support its wisdom.
The public, we are told, has become highly mistrustful of all public figures. Why? Are politicians or corporate chieftains any more corrupt than they ever were? The ghostly legions of yesterday's crusading reporters would argue that they are not.
Instead, many studies suggest that public cynicism is based on the big-wigs' seeming ability to get away with their mischief, unfettered by the checks and balances that are supposed to make society work. To mangle a ë92 catch-phrase, "It's the impunity, stupid?"
Money, favors, and focus on profits and media outlets have created a type of news reporting that more closely resembles an infomercial than a no-holds-barred search for the truth.
If this deplorable situation is to turn around, the changes won't come from any epiphany among public figures. Power will continue to corrupt the naive and attract the already corrupt just as it always has. But newsrooms tired of being taken for granted and ready to uncover and report the truth no matter where it leads can bring us back to an involvement in public affairs as it makes public figures again accountable to the nation that makes them.
It isn't that people don't care what's happening around them, it's that they despair of knowing in time to do anything about it. Faced with an impossible situation, most creatures, lab mice and humans alike, become passive. But there's a nascent and unslaked thirst for information among the citizenry, and anything that deals with it sells; ask the tabloids or Matt Drudge.
The millions who read these "fringe" outlets don't do so because they get everything right (they don't). They often follow them because they get some things right and those things are usually big deals! In the hands of a tough, experienced editor, that level of enthusiasm just might bring newspapers back to their former position of preeminence in the marketplace of ideas. And perhaps back to profitability as well.
Many newspapers will find this a difficult strategy to adopt, let alone follow. But it may be the vision that will help them weather today's technology storms and reconnect long-term with the readers that made them great.
Barry Schaeffer is president of X.ystems.Inc. (formerly Information Strategies Inc.) The company's Web site is located at www.trategies.com.