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Defenders of print, unite!
If journalism were a Marvel comic, I’d want some superhero — Clark Kent, perhaps? — to make that exclamation in bold type every time the evil digital minions cackle over the demise of a newspaper.
The cackles came around again this weekend when the Independent, a United Kingdom paper started in 1986, announced it would no longer be publishing a print edition.
“At its peak sales hit around 428,000 copies a day. Twenty-five years later, the number of copies being sold on a weekday in newsagents is rather closer to 28,000.”
When circulation falls of by more than 90 percent, that tells me there were problems far beyond the competition of online news. Still, I won’t deny the precipitous decline of print circulation and the difficulties faced by newspapers here and abroad.
Yet, I have been reading for the past 15 years how print newspapers will disappear within 10 years. I read it again twice today. And it is usually written with a certain amount of ‘I told you so’ resignation that, if those dullards had just listened, they would have shut down the presses a decade ago.
Here, however, is what I don’t read in the newspaper obituaries.
As they tick off a list of newspapers no longer in print, they rarely mention the hundreds, probably thousands of web news startups that no longer exist.
The unsurprising irony: Search for something like ‘failed web news sites’ and you’ll get a link to a story from 2009 that no longer works. Yes, that internet history from six long years ago is little more than ether.
But once in awhile somebody does examine what is happening in the brave new world of online news. In fact, Alan Mutter did so just today.
“One of every four news start-ups has failed, according to a survey I conducted,” he writes.
Mutter points out what we have learned all too painfully these past two decades: People don’t pay for news online.
Of all the digital prophets out there who pat themselves on the back for their predictions of print perishing, and who advised papers to just turn off their presses a decade ago, I’d like to have a show of hands of those who figured out how to make online news a profitable venture.
Because I’m not talking about profit for profit’s sake, and neither is Mutter.
I’m talking about profit for the sake of employing journalists who will cover the town planning commission at 7 p.m. on Monday night.
Who will sift through each day’s court filings to see what’s there.
Who will call every police station in the county every morning and every evening to find out what happened.
Who will walk into a closed meeting and demand that it be open.
Who will ask the politician “Why?”
When I defend print, it is not so much on behalf of the publications that count their circulation in the hundreds of thousands and their competition as Buzzfeed and Twitter and Facebook.
I do so on behalf of the newspapers serving 5,000 households in rural communities and trying to work with businesses that, like them, hope to survive for another generation or two. Yes, they too are competing with Buzzfeed, Twitter and Facebook, none of which care two hoots about what goes on there.
