We shouldn’t let the backlash to Roy Peter Clark’s article Your Duty to Read the Paper let us miss the fact that he diagnosed a real and important problem: The economic model of print newspapers is falling apart and is not being replaced online.
The destruction of the print business is leaving an online business too small to support the cost of creating original content at all but the largest scales. Large-scale content markets — say,national sports or national business, possibly even a few national news providers like the Times — are now large enough (or close) to pay people to create content. What happens in Raleigh, N.C.? Or Peoria, Ill.? Or Carlisle, Pa.?
I keep coming back to this fundamental problem: For most newspapers, the average reader spends more time with a print edition on a single day than the average visitor to a paper’s Web site spends in an entire month. If this continues, we won’t be able to afford to pay journalists to report and write/tell stories that take days or weeks to produce, except in the largest markets.
The problem is, the per-article cost of hiring a journalist to report and write a story isn’t much lower in Peoria than Los Angeles.
It’s time to innovate, for sure. We need journalism that can be produced at lower costs and still earn large traffic. The Web offers some advantages in that regard. First, content can spread virally. And second, traffic can build over time instead of having to be delivered to a single print edition or broadcast.
That’s one major reason why database-driven journalism is so important. Journalism that includes data — or is structured as data — can have value for days, weeks or months after initial publication.
Here’s just one example of how newsworthy information can be packaged as data so it has ongoing value. It’s a data-driven journalism project, with reporting by two students from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, as part of the News21 reporting project: One Vote Under God.
I agree that requiring people to buy the paper is counterproductive. Though, I can’t imagine it’s a good idea for journalists who work for the paper not to read the print edition regularly. The print paper is still the biggest piece of newspaper companies’ business. It needs to be as good as possible for as long as possible, within the constraints of budgetary realities.
I wish print newsrooms weren’t shrinking. But I do believe many newspaper companies have room to improve their print products — even if the staffs are smaller than today. It will require:
- Understanding the audience.
- Fundamentally rethinking how news operations work.
A few companies are actually doing both of these now. For instance, check out this AJR article on the transformation of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newsroom.
What do you think? Please comment below.
