What really is in the future for newspapers?
Today the San Antonio Express-News unveiled a few changes to their online edition, mainly in the above the fold area of the home page. The intent appears to be to make the online edition more dynamic and provide the latest information in the top part of the page. Blogs and twitter updates are also included on the home page as the paper starts to leverage new media as a means to deliver content. This can also be seen in the Twitter accounts many of the staff have where they post breaking information or cool topics. However, with all these changes will this help save the paper from closing its doors as more and more readers drop subscriptions and opt for other sources for news?
Newspapers today are suffering badly in the era of new media, Twitter and Facebook. With all the new online tools more and more people are finding new sources to get their information updates, some good and some bad. Bloggers seem to be paving the path for a new model of content delivery. In a post last year providing several social media and Web 2.0 stats Technorati estimated the number of blog records indexed since 2002 to be 133 million. As the tools become more and more easy to use more people are heading to the blogosphere. I count myself as one of those and enjoy providing information with possibly a different point of view.
However, blogs should never be viewed as authoritative sources. Bloggers such as myself don’t have the time to invest in vetting stories to make sure the information is completely accurate. In many cases I rely on traditional media to do that work and just add a perspective on the story. I also don’t have the skills reporters are taught in school and on the job about reporting as accurately as possible. In an interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Toledo Blade President Obama voiced concern on the direction readership in America and newspapers are headed.
“I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding,” the President said.
According to an article in the NY Times the steady decline of newspaper revenues may finally be slowing and possibly see the bottom soon. Hopefully this is the case as newspapers appear to be in a cannibalistic mood these days, laying off reports and cutting content in order to reduce expenses. Personally I feel they are going about this the wrong way. If you look at a newspaper’s cost model the most expensive aspect of the paper is production and delivery of the print edition. But newspapers seem determined to retain this aspect and instead sacrifice the content that fills that print edition. They should remember the content is why people buy papers and not for the actual medium.
So, as the Express-News continues to change its operating model hopefully these changes will result in a better business model and head off the closure of San Antonio’s only daily. Without it San Antonians will be resigned to getting the information from less than credible sources. As President Obama said in the interview about newspapers “… it’s something that I think is absolutely critical to the health of our democracy.”
Hey RBear,
I have mixed feelings about this subject. I certainly agree that blogs and other Web 2.0 can’t be relied as authorative sources (btw, check out True Enough about that subject), however, the quality of newspapers has seriously declined in the past 15 years. Most content is cut and paste from AP newswire with no serious perspective on the story being reported. Just last week, a friend and I were mentioning how poorly written alot of the local articles on mysa.com are. Many of the articles are rambling, coherent, and don’t even deliver who?what?where?when? on alot of the topics. Basically, what I’m saying, is that newspapers did this to themselves. Look at how the EN said adieu to Ken Rodriguez and Carlos Guerra but added a slew of bloggers who write stuff that reads like something out of a high school freshman composition class.
BTW, I feel your blog is better than about 90% of the stuff from reporters supposedly trained and educated to produce journalism. Your blog and SA Mayor were my first reads during the recent mayor/city council election. The content was sometimes biased (even though that was fully disclosed) but at least provided thoughtful commentary on the races and provided information such as Castro’s online townhalls, etc. I never saw any of that on mysa from anyone.
Thanks for the comments and compliments. I agree that today’s newspaper content is slowly declining in quality and quantity as the organizations try to cope with costs and declining revenues. A lot of new models are being explored to see if newspapers can survive. Yesterday the NY Times reported that an investor is teaming with a journalism school and a public radio station to provide a new nonprofit news website in the Bay area. In Texas a new statewide nonprofit news organization is being established called the Texas Tribune. Evan Smith, formerly of Texas Monthly, left the magazine to head up that organization. We’ll have to wait and see if this becomes the new model for news. If so, some news organizations could continue to survive. However, that model is sustainable only for major cities. The regionals and small locals will suffer and probably fade away.