Changes in the newspaper industry as seen through a retiring insider
The Wall Street Journal weekend edition has a very interesting feature about changes in the newspaper industry. It's written by a retiring editor, Paul Steiger, whose professional career spans 40 years plus. The author focuses on changes wrought in the past decade by the rise of the internet. This article is currently only available to Journal subscribers, so you may not be able to access it through the link.
Of course, that could be changing. New WSJ owner Rupert Murdoch is considering opening th website to anyone at no cost. If you'd like a copy of the article email me.
It was the fall of 1999, and the newspaper I edited, The Wall Street Journal, was awash in money. Thanks to the dot-com boom and the lush advertising it generated, we were running the presses at full tilt nearly every day, yet had to turn away ads for lack of space.
Even as the good times rolled, two non-newspaper names kept coming up. I recall being stunned to learn that the main place where our own readers checked stock prices was the finance section of Yahoo. A couple of kids from Stanford had launched a search engine called Google. Already, many of my colleagues were using it.
Less than six months later, the tech bubble began to deflate. Hundreds of dot-coms died, taking with them their ad budgets. But the Web industry pushed forward, and within a few years it shredded newspaper business models that had held sway for decades.
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The Journal's editors have asked me to retrace my experiences of the past four decades in search of insights into how all this has happened, what may happen next and the implications of all this change for readers, the nation and society at large.
For readers, the implications are clear: a stark contrast of feast and famine.
The cornucopia of national, international and business news, sports, and especially opinion available free on the Web is rich beyond historical parallel. Anyone with a fact, a comment, a snapshot or a video clip can self-publish and instantly compete with the professionals.
At the same time, the vast array of investigative reporting and foreign correspondence assembled at American newspapers over the past several decades is being cut back at all but a few publications, as papers succumb to the pressure to cut costs.
Many journalists and academics see in these cutbacks a threat to the democratic ideal of a well-informed public. Some urge turning to philanthropy or an expansion of public television as a way to fill the gap. Others have begun to argue for a government subsidy for newspapers -- an unlikely prospect for now.
Less clear is how the industry will ultimately be transformed.
Many papers are seeking to leap ahead in adapting to the movement of readers and advertisers to the Internet. This means tightly holding down costs of print publications while leveraging metro papers' principal unique assets: local reporting staffs and local ad-sales teams.
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