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Would You Ever Read A Newspaper Again?
Are newspapers over? Is there anything papers can do that would get you to buy them and read them every day? Is there any reason to preserve their form and function, any vital purpose they serve?
At this moment in media history, newspapers have never been more pressed to define themselves, or done a worse job.
All over the information spectrum, media audiences are fragmented, drawn to the timeliness, convenience and immediacy of cable news, and the Net and the Web.
Slow to grasp the implications of emerging information technologies like radio, TV, cable, then the Net and Web, papers have been asking themselves more or less the same questions for half a century now: what should we be? What do people want of us? And newspaper readers have been asking the inverse: do we need papers anymore? Is there anything in them for us?
One thing is obvious: the answer doesn't really lie in the focus groups and marketing sessions that have become a feature of newspaper industry planning. Nor does it lie in the proliferation of mostly boring online versions newspapers that, with few exceptions (the Wall Street Journal, the Minneapolis Tribune, the San Jose Mercury News, USA Today, the Boston Globe), divert resources, compete with their own hard-copy versions and make little money, at least so far.
The challenge for newspapers is the same one it's been for nearly a half century. It isn't technological. It's creative. They don't tell us things we don't know. They don't offer us good writing or strong opinion. They don't even have good comics any more. And their coverage of technology generally sucks. And profoundly so.
In the midst of the greatest information revolution in human history, it's hard to point to a single newspaper that has radically altered it's mission, content and appearance to keep up with the Information Revolution and the spread of digital information.
In recent years, newspapers have remained graphically impaired. They seem oblivious to the graphic revolution that has swept magazines and is spreading through the Web.
Papers continue to cover new media technologies and popular culture poorly, alienating young and future audiences. They have ceded good writing to magazines, publishing and websites.
Papers seem seem almost stupefyingly oblivious to the fact that they aren't in the breaking news business anymore. Fifteen to 24 hours after CNN and innumerable websites reported that George W.Bush would soundly thump John McCain in South Carolina, most newspapers reported the news on page one the next morning as if none of their readers had heard it before, despite the fact that almost all of them had.
As the Net and Web spawn ferocious and idiosyncratic commentary, democratizing opinion all over the country, newspapers cling to stuffy and elitist op-ed pages, where opinion is generally confined to a "left" and "right" and voice usually given to elite claques of pundits, academics, authors and CEO's.
Technology, perhaps the central social issue of our times - and without a doubt the biggest ongoing story in America and much of the world -- is spawning a host of significant issues of relevance to almost everyone: genetics, artificial intelligence, open source and free software (and social) movements, patent, copyright and intellectual content questions, nano-technology, super-computing, the runaway rise of the Net, the Web, and e-commerce.
How many of these stories make their way to the front pages of newspapers? Few, and then rarely. Newspapers are still mired in anti-deluvian and phobic notions about technology - is Johnny getting onto the Playboy website, is it safe to use your credit card online, are predators waiting to stalk your kids, are hackers waiting to invade your website, does the Net promote loneliness and isolation?
Newspapers are the scolds of the Digital Age, shrieking and clucking about a changing world (the Net, the Web, movies, TV shows, rap, hip-hop, kids today) like Temperance Ladies wandering into a bar.
The press will obsess on the semen on Monica Lewinsky's dress, but still won't take technology seriously. Newspapers still don't recognize that that the Net isn't a sex story or a business or cracking story, but increasing, the biggest story of our time.
In "Code," Lawrence Lessing of Harvard writes about the evolution of new laws in cyberspace. In "Hamlet On the Holodeck," Janet Murray of MIT writes about the emergence of new kinds of culture - gaming, MUD's, hypertext -- among the gifted geeks and nerds on the Internet. In "Genome," Matt Ridley writes about the staggering implications of the Human Genome Project. You will hardly ever see these issues on the front pages of newspapers, or anywhere inside.
Newspapers are also struggling to define evolving definitions of culture, leisure time, recreation and amusement. Opera, classical music, hard cover books, art museums are one kind of culture. But there are new kinds - elaborate and creative gaming and video cultures, creative coding, the booming business of Web architecture and design, proliferating weblogs (hives of individual opinion and expression), vast messaging systems and services like AIM and ICQ, collaborative global information-and-software sharing movements like Linux.
Few newspaper readers have even heard about these new kinds of culture. No wonder kids - especially geek and nerd kids -- have abandoned papers in droves.
This timidity and lack of risk-taking is astounding, especially for an industry that doesn't let a day go by without lamenting it's declining place in the world, and wondering what on earth it should do to compete with CNN'ism, Salon, and a plethora of other competitors.
It's hard to know what might work for papers, since there is no paper that has tried anything that could even remotely be described as radical change.
Is it too late? Do any of you read newspapers? Do you see a future for them? Is there anything they could do that would make you want to subscribe to and read them, either in hard copy or online form?
What do you think?:
In the local newspaper I can see all my high school classmates and the crimes they've committed and the strange people they've married. I have yet to find all (or any for that matter) of the local municipality's websites and see the blotter online. That information is what makes me laugh during my morning coffee/tea/breakfast.
There are certain things I read online and others that I go straight to the daily paper to read. They both have their place.
-d9
Are you interested in knowing how you can compete with on-line news enterprises? A lot of this goes for TV and radio, too.
You know what I hate about newspapers? This is an election year, right? You know what would be useful to me? If someone itemized the participants in the race, and their claims, and declared positions on things, and then cross-checked that with their backgrounds, their voting records if applicable, campaign finances, former business partners, and so forth. I don't mean that glib, drop-in-the-bucket narrative you guys print now. I want charts. I want tables. Then print that every Sunday. Keep it up to date! Now, if a dozen of you did it, and you all competed in doing that - who'se more accurate, more impartial, who'se got more dirt... and so forth, then I'd race to the corner shop and buy several papers just to keep up.
I don't just idly want that information, I need it!
Newspapers have always made this claim that they're the guardians of democracy. Well, guardianship is relative, guys. Relatively speaking, compared to your (collectively) slipshod, partisan, "we're insiders and you're not" approach to informing the public about politics, there are half a dozen websites better than the best newspaper for election coverage.
This exposes a bigger issue. You guys focus group to death. Who are you, President Clinton wannabees? Do not write to the lowest common denominator! Write to a higher standard and let the public rise to it! The Lewinsky debacle couldn't have happened had the press not abbetted the sensationalism. As though journalists and editors live in a world where people are shocked by adultery? Not only does nobody care in their own lives, they assume the rich and powerful engage in it. Do you think we weren't all sick to death about hearing about Elian Gonzales within the first 48 hours? There are millions of homeless children, children with dead parents, custody battles... But someone, somewhere, assumes that we'll care about that one. Stupid.
But most of all - just cover the politics. Cover it like you're getting paid to do it. We don't want quips or anecdotes. Veiled party politics. Republican papers and democratic papers. We want to hear it every week like every candidate is a stranger to us. Most of them are!
Aren't you all sick of hearing about how 90% of Americans, when stopped on the street, don't know the first thing about John McCain, or his platform? Or Bill Bradley? Well, guess who'se fault it is, guys. There they are, the numbers screaming out at you that no one knows this stuff. That's the information people - society! - desperately needs - deliver it to our doorstep!
For a little consideration, a little less smug patronizing, and, if nothing else, thorough, systematic coverage of the election, I would gladly pay multiples of your subscription price.
We're on the road to Tycho.