The Future Of The News Business — or Who Needs All Those Executives Anyway?
A Nipped In The Bud Column
By Bud Angst
Here’s an item from the April 26 edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer:
“The Inquirer and Philadelpia Daily News both posted circulation declines for the six months ending March 31, the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) reported April 28.
Average Monday-to-Friday circulation at the Inquirer showed a decline of 5.1 percent over the same period last year. The Daily News average weekday circulation showed a 9.7 percent decline. The Inquirer’s Sunday circulation was down 6.7 percent.
An Inquirer executive blamed the decline on “reduced use” of circulation programs and a price increase. In simple language, he’s saying that his paper fell down on the job of selling itself. He’s not about to admit that he and his colleagues are living in a world that is crumbling around them.
A recent ABC report shows overall daily newspaper paid circulation declined at a rate of 3.6 percent over the same period a year ago.
Of the nation’s 25 largest newspapers, only two racked up circulation gains in the 12 months that ended last March 31. All others registered declines in daily circulation.
The average daily circulation of the more-than-500 newspapers that report to the ABC fell 3.5 percent in the most recent reporting period.
Editors and publishers are blaming a changing reader climate for the circulation decline and some are attempting to meet the challenge by administrative, editorial and production personnel cutbacks. Those are probably very necessary, immediate measures, but they are not the long-term answer to the newspaper industry’s problem.
The growth of television news coverage, particularly the emergence and growth of tv channels devoted entirely to news and commentary, generally is blamed for much of the decline of the influence of the daily print media.
I’ve got news for my daily newspaper colleagues.
It’s not television that causing your problems, friends. Radio and TV have been around for many, many years and the print media survived their impact quite well all that time. Your problem, colleagues, is the easy and inexpensive access to the Internet for both writers and readers.
Anyone with a computer and a “mouse” these days can choose his news from a proliferation of sources and anyone similarly equipped can publish his own message worldwide. No longer is Joe Shmoe dependent upon his local newspaper for either a forum or a source of news about what is going on around him.
If the public can inform itself of local, national, and international events for free via “The Web,” then how long do you suppose they will be willing to plod their way through a daily small print , hard-to-read publication loaded with distracting advertising and irrelevant trivia?
If Joe Schmoe can vent his own likes and dislikes via the worldwide web and, for all practical purposes, do so anonymously and without the expenditure of anything but his time, why should he go to the trouble and expense of writing and submitting his output to an editor who will give him no attention or exposure unless he has first revealed his identity.
This is a new day, colleagues, in which ink is no longer an essential ingredient of the communications mix and Friend Shmoe, from the laptop in his parlor, can respond immediately to anything we write with which he disagrees or, even worse, can turn us off with a flick of the finger. And he can read our “stuff” without searching for it through a thicket of distracting verbiage, pictures and drawings designed not so much to inform us as to induce us to buy something we didn’t know we needed or wanted.
For years, dear colleagues, our prose, our product, was distributed as an adjunct to the advertising that paid for printing and distribution of the news. Success depended not on how well we wrote or how deeply we dug into the topic of immediate interest, but on how well our “ad department” sold its wares. Now our message must stand on its own merits.
And that’s a whole new ball game in a whole new ball park with a whole new set of rules that are only now being written.
For “old-timers” this may be a daunting time. We’ve got so much to learn, unlearn and relearn about this business. And our editors and publishers surely have even more to unlearn than we do.
Yes, “The times, they are a-changing.” And the news disseminating business is having a difficult time adjusting to the new climate. But people will always be interested in news of the world around them. Which means that good reporters will always be in demand. They may get to see their output on a screen instead of on paper, but what they write will still be in demand if it concerns an interesting subject, well presented.
Free people create an insatiable demand for information on what is going on around them. Our mission is to fill that demand. These days we reporters can do that without paper, without ink, even without ad departments and printing presses. But there will always be a need for good reporters and writers.
But all those other people in our business who seem to think our world can’t do without them – the publishers, advertising salesmen, printers and those fat cats in the plush offices on the top floor – I’m not so certain about the long term need for them.