So here I am launching a blog, and pondering its implications. There is blood on my hands. Ink, rather … Venerable newspapers face extinction (from the May 1, 2008 issue of the Economist):
THE New York Times once epitomised all that was great about American newspapers; now it symbolises its industry’s deep malaise. The Grey Lady’s circulation is tumbling, down another 3.9% in the latest data from America’s Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC). Its advertising revenues are down, too (12.5% lower in March than a year earlier), as is the share price of its owner, the New York Times Company, up from its January low but still over 20% below what it was last July. On Tuesday April 29th Standard & Poor’s cut the firm’s debt rating to one notch above junk.
A specter is haunting 620 8th Avenue in Manhattan – it is the ghost of the great economist, Joseph Schumpeter. It is also haunting newspapers large and small all across America. For those who don’t know him, Schumpeter’s ghost is a balding, German-accented fellow that few would recognize, but he is haunting them all the same. While alive, Schumpeter championed capitalism, while predicting its ultimate demise. Presumably the specter of Schumpeter is pleased that the corpus of Schumpeter erred in his prediction.
All the powers of old media have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise Schumpeter’s theory: media mogul and rock star, publisher and studio head, opinion-editing elitist and radio-spittling populist.
In 2001, the humbling of the “arrogance and hubris” of the Stanford MBAs and their new economy faith was welcomed with smug chuckles of the old guard. They still call it the Internet “bubble” – implying with certain confidence that inside the stock valuations of oh-so-many companies was nothing but air. Schumpeter’s ghost is now chuckling, as the incessant information technologies are continuing to unfold with much more force than bubbles, like some accelerating fire scorching existing businesses and business models
Some are smugly suggesting that the newspapers are in duress because they failed to plan ahead. The newspapers will fall regardless whether their owners plan or not. But those who see ahead see that the newspaper business has nothing to do with paper and everything to do with news.
The future is all about information. It is a future ripe for editors and writers whose life’s work is the manifestation of information. The packaging is what the old business model represents, and that packaging – a few hundred pages of cheap pulp smeared with a quarter-cup of ink – will not see the end of the next decade
It’s no secret that, as the Economist notes, “this decline is being blamed on the rise of the internet.” But what about the Internet, exactly? One cause is surely the loss of classified advertising to craigslist.com and eBay.com. Another cause is simply speed – why wait 24 hours to learn “breaking” news? A third cause is money, namely the high costs of physical production of a newspaper. And yet, the more important phenomenon that I see is disaggregation. A better way to think of this is personalized aggregation, something that can be done digitally with ease.
Why bother reading the six or seven political experts assembled by the Times, when I only enjoy Kristoff, Krugman and Kristol (okay, I’ll admit it … and Dowd)? Alternatively, I can use an RSS feed to get seven (or twenty) of my favorite writers piped directly to me at bloglines?
What is under siege is the business of mass-market aggregated news. I do not know if it can survive, but I do know that – as a blogger – I have its ink on my hands.
From my perspective the fundamental change in institutions like the Grey Lady has not been from the internet (although it certainly has changed the dynamics) - it has been the rise of editors who do not understand the truth in the notion you proposed in your initial post - namely that in this blog "We will be non-partisan, but not non-political."
Blogs serve two functions - first, they are informative. There the substance of the activity should be both non-partisan and non-political. Second, they provide us with opinion - and there they can be partisan and political. The best newspapers understand that for the informative side of the enterprise they should follow the first approach but the NYT has ignored that standard too often.
I would not worry about having the NYT ink on your hands. I am concerned about the effects on society if we have no institution that serves the informative function. I expect that there is plenty of demand for it and if the NYT cannot fulfill it, someone will.
Posted by: drtaxsacto | May 27, 2008 at 08:28 AM
From my perspective the fundamental change in institutions like the Grey Lady has not been from the internet (although it certainly has changed the dynamics) - it has been the rise of editors who do not understand the truth in the notion you proposed in your initial post - namely that in this blog "We will be non-partisan, but not non-political."
Blogs serve two functions - first, they are informative. There the substance of the activity should be both non-partisan and non-political. Second, they provide us with opinion - and there they can be partisan and political. The best newspapers understand that for the informative side of the enterprise they should follow the first approach but the NYT has ignored that standard too often. In the last couple of years, blogs have filled both functions - often muddying the link between the two. But they have frequently shown that the NYT and many other media outlets are no better at separating the information from the opinion function.
I would not worry about having the NYT ink on your hands. I am concerned about the effects on society if we have no institution that serves the informative function. I expect that there is plenty of demand for it and if the NYT cannot fulfill it, someone will.
Posted by: drtaxsacto | May 27, 2008 at 08:32 AM