Thursday, March 19, 2009

The Killing Fields

This post is from Ed, who finds that newspapers -- the printed product -- are simply fading out of his life.

I'll tell my story because I fear I may be killing an American industry.

I've read newspapers as long as I can remember. It all started with the Sunday funnies. Those whimsical and colorful four-panel strips that told stories that often went over my head. I remember quite vividly that the local radio station would read the funnies on the radio every Sunday at a certain hour, and I was able to follow along and enjoy the tales. As years go by, the sections change but the delivery method remained the same. My interest moved to ads (what toy do I want next), and then around age 10 to the Sports section.

The Sports section was the most important part of the morning. The stats, the box scores, were my connection to another world. I would spend hours looking at the box score and recreating in my mind all the action from the previous night's games. There were no TV highlights; in my mind the images I saw were the faces from the baseball cards. But I saw images; I saw the action. And Sunday- Sunday was special. Sunday had ALL the stats for ALL the players printed on two full pages, and I would spend hours dissecting, analyzing, and reviewing all the numbers. Who had the most hits? Who had the most home runs? Every Sunday, I had to know. And what was great was that the stats were through the previous Friday's game -- they were CURRENT.

It was all there in print . And it was each and every morning. Like magic, I would wake, open the front door, and find the medium to transport me to another world waiting in the driveway. And should the paper NOT be there, well a whole round of curses for the paper boy. Damn him to heck -- give me my Sports section.

* * *

Over time, the love affair changed but it was still there. It was the Friday weekend section, where I first saw what movies were opening that day and what records were on sale at Tower Records that week. It was where I found my first job, bought my first car. The newspaper was an hour or more each day of news, views, ideas, dreams, wants, needs, good, and bad. It was the start of each day, and no day could begin without it.

Today I start each day with a glance through the e-mail and then 30 minutes on the RSS Reader. All my news delivered to the computer. I don't have to put on slippers and stroll through the dew; I wake the computer and open the browser. If I want opinion, a laugh, a provoking thought, or just a general what's-going-on, it's all online. I don't wait until Sunday to get my stats- I go to ESPN and get 100 more stats than the newspaper ever provided. If I want to know what movie opens this week (or the next 12 weeks), it's online. Buy something -- online. Local news -- online. National -- online. Want a laugh -- the internet's loaded. What's on sale? It was emailed to me that morning.

I still subscribe to my local paper. I cut down to Thursday through Sunday because I wasn't reading during the week. Even now, Thursday and Friday's paper often sits in the garage unread until Saturday. If then. Often I'm throwing away the paper, rubber band still wraped around the twice folded relic. On the days I read it, I spend a fraction of the time I used to. I skip most of the ads (saw them online), I quickly browse the sports (the news stories are half a day old, I read them at lunch the day before), and I skim the rest. I think every day about canceling. I could really use the extra money, but I just can't do it.

* * *

I know my paper is dying. It's a McClatchy paper -- it's on its last legs. Money is tight in my corner of the world, but yet for some reason I keep getting it. I can't give up on my youth, my standard news bearer. In some ways I feel that canceling my paper is canceling on my community, my city, my city's history and in so many ways my history. I tell myself that with the internet, I'm not missing the news -- I'm just getting it in shorter, quicker doses. What I lack in depth, I gain in...

I don't gain. I don't get depth. The RSS reader gives me a quick sentence or two. Sometimes I click and read an entire article, but often not. The thoughts and opinions I read are thoughts and opinions I agree with- why click or subscribe to a blog that doesn't share my values. The sports opinion now comes from national writers; I don't read the local opinions any more. I don't experience the joy of imagining a game -- I see the highlights instantly on the web. I don't wait for the weather -- I catch a bottom scroll on the tv, link on my homepage, or even a menu on the Wii. I get digital copies of the ads I want to see, and don't give a second thought to the ads I miss. I read news on my cell phone, on my computer, and on my Kindle (I'm also killing the book printing industry; go ahead and add that my iPod is killing the music industry while you're at it). I probably spend twice as long reading news, but next to no time with a newspaper. And I know that even though I still subscribe, I am transitioning further away from the newspaper. I'm killing an American industry.

10 comments:

  1. ... and I get up in the morning to see my thoughts are posted. There's no typing a letter to the editor and checking the back of section B each day to see if it's printed. My RSS reader pops up and tells me Joe posted my comments. It's immediate; it's close; it's quick. And I can follow up in an instant with an additional thought. While it's amazing, it's... is it good?

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  2. Of course it's good! What's going on here is a conversation. Print media worked one way; they told you the story and you, at best, agreed with it or fumed at it with a small circle of friends. Now everyone can chime in, bring expertise, life experience and just their smarts to the whole process. Electronic news delivery, done with open comments, brings accountability to the press that was never there before.

    Joe asks, "What is the future of newspapers," while creating that future right here.

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  3. I sympathize with your sentiment here—but something about it doesn't sit right with me. I had the same gut reaction to Joe's recent piece describing his nostalgia for newspapers, and of late I've found myself trying to figure out what, exactly, is causing my mental discomfort.

    You mention the funny pages. I also loved reading them as a kid, but now, at 31 years, I find them completely boring: they contain (with very few exceptions) the same out-dated strips and predictable humor. It's as if the "Andy Griffith Show" was still being shown in prime time. The web, however, has tons of creative artists drawing interesting comix.

    You mention the sports pages. I too pored over the Sunday statistics as a kid, but when I discovered Rob Neyer's blog, well, I found his writing far more informative and engaging than anything I had ever read in a newspaper. I was soon led to the many other great baseball sites on the net (including Joe's), and now most newspaper reporting of baseball seems thin and their analysis often uninformed.

    I'll steer clear of politics here, but you mentioned the music industry. I remember as a teenager taking my cues from the radio—heck, I even taped songs off the radio. What else could you do when you lived in a small town and had little money? But the internet (okay, and more money) has provided access to an amazing array of musicians and bands that never get radio play.

    All this leads to a few thoughts. Newspapers (and the music industry) generally tend to appeal to the lowest common denominator—USA Today (and pop radio) being the most palpable example(s). So for me, getting my information from the internet is far less an issue of speed than an issue of depth.

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  4. My $0.02

    I am old enough to recall a somewhat golden era of newspapers 40 years ago, where in the downtown area of my city there were newspaper stands on every corner that appeared to be doing bustling business. It felt like the paper was really special, and you'd keep papers from several days past because you had not read the whole thing. My city does not have a MLB team so baseball coverage was terrible, but I think I still have some of the sports pages with daily stats from other cities when I was on vacation. This was a time when I read and reread every baseball related sports section article as well as poured over each box score, often saving important ones.

    Things are just a little different today. I still view the box scores, but now I do it during and immediately after the game, not 1 or 2 days later. Today I consider the newspaper a piece of garbage that I must recycle each week. Something that was once one of the days major pleasures is now a burden for me. When newspapers push a free 2-4 week home delivery I try to explain that I would pay them a small fee if they would *stop* delivering these free papers. I don't bother even opening them up, they just go straight to the recycle bin.

    The reasons? I am less hungry for just any kind of reading material these days - I can get any news info I want 24-48 hours before it appears in a a newspaper. That should be enough for anyone to understand why newspapers cannot possibly survive. It seems like the last justification for keeping newspapers around is that you can read it while you are in the bathroom. That is a pretty big fall from the prominence of newspapers in the 1st 3/4 of the 20th century.

    Tip for those who can't possible have a bowel movement without a newspaper: Get a printer and read about news from 5 minutes ago:-).My $0.02

    I am old enough to recall a somewhat golden era of newspapers 40 years ago, where in the downtown area of my city there were newspaper stands on every corner that appeared to be doing bustling business. It felt like the paper was really special, and you'd keep papers from several days past because you had not read the whole thing. My city does not have a MLB team so baseball coverage was terrible, but I think I still have some of the sports pages with daily stats from other cities when I was on vacation. This was a time when I read and reread every baseball related sports section article as well as poured over each box score, often saving important ones.

    Things are just a little different today. I still view the box scores, but now I do it during and immediately after the game, not 1 or 2 days later. Today I consider the newspaper a piece of garbage that I must recycle each week. Something that was once one of the days major pleasures is now a burden for me. When newspapers push a free 2-4 week home delivery I try to explain that I would pay them a small fee if they would *stop* delivering these free papers. I don't bother even opening them up, they just go straight to the recycle bin.

    The reasons? I am less hungry for just any kind of reading material these days - I can get any news info I want 24-48 hours before it appears in a a newspaper. That should be enough for anyone to understand why newspapers cannot possibly survive. It seems like the last justification for keeping newspapers around is that you can read it while you are in the bathroom. That is a pretty big fall from the prominence of newspapers in the 1st 3/4 of the 20th century.

    Tip for those who can't possible have a bowel movement without a newspaper: Get a printer and read about news from 5 minutes ago:-).

    ReplyDelete
  5. I don't understand advertising. It seems that until recently, advertisers were willing to spend lots of money on print ads-- ads that were wedged around the stories, ads that everyone reading the paper tried hard to ignore. Ads wrapped around the story I'm reading? I'll avert my eyes or maybe glance quickly. A full-page ad? I'll just flip the paper without reading it.

    Sure, there had to be some sort of subliminal effect on the reader from those ads. But what is the difference between those print ads and advertisements on a website, arranged in just the same proximity to the stories? Advertisers paid for the print ads for generations, but won't pay for the same exact web ads.

    Internet ads should be able to generate almost as much revenue as the print ads used to, since they're pretty much identical. I don't think there is as much effort put into selling them though. It seems like everyone has just decided that advertising just can't work on the web like it did in print, and so no one's trying that hard to sell it, and so no one's paying for it.

    This has led to internet ads being comparably dirt cheap, and to the development of hyper- annoying, hyper-disruptive internet ads that interrupt your reading and yell at you. That is certainly not the answer.

    No one's going to pay for what they can get for free. This is the problem. But the other side of that is that advertisers aren't going to pay much for web ads if they can already get them for virtually free.

    The current situation is like a new free paper opening up in a city with an established newspaper, and in addition to being free to customers, the new paper is giving advertisers huge discounts, giving them virtually free ad space. How would an established newspaper respond to that threat? Give up? Cut their ad rates down to almost nothing to match the new competition? Cut their cover price down to zero? I think they'd probably look at cutting rates and prices a bit, but they'd also say that their space is worth more than the free paper's space, so advertisers should pay more for it, and then they'd work hard to convince their clients of that.

    Popular websites should value their space as much as newspapers value their space, and charge more for it. It would take a lot more vision and effort to convince advertisers that it is valuable, but it seems like no one is even willing to try that.

    The whole newspaper crisis is a business problem and requires a business solution. Changing the content isn't going to fix the basic business problem. Newspapers are going to have to change their delivery medium, to mostly a web one. But the problem will continue until a business solution is found.

    The solution, if it is found, is going to come from internet advertising sales. It seems like papers are blaming everything else in the world for their problems, rather than working to find an advertising solution that will work.

    Advertisers have spent billions on print ads, and the need for ads is not going to go away. They will migrate to the internet with newspapers, but the papers had better have found a way to convince them to pay a lot more for web ads, and soon, or they're going to miss the boat again.

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  6. Bucholz -- what if the decline in newspaper circulations has led advertizers to conclude that those ads weren't really driving sales to begin with? At least nowhere near in proportion to the price they were paying for them. It's hard to get our minds around it because we've all be raised in an advertizing culture, but I don't know we can say that it's a given that ads work in the manner in which we think they do, at least not anymore.

    Does everyone drink Budweiser because of the ads, or does Budwieser simply have all of those ads because they can pay for them given that everyone is drinking Budweiser?

    Maybe internet pricing of ads is far closer to approximating their actual value.

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  7. That's probably true. But the thing is, newspaper ad sales departments were able to convince advertisers that their newsprint space was worth the money. I'm sure that wasn't easy and it didn't happen overnight.

    It just seems to me that newspapers don't value their online space much at all, and seem to be not interested in marketing it and trying to convince advertisers that it's worth more than they're paying for it.

    I'm not very knowledgeable about ad sales so maybe I'm wrong. I'm sure people who work in online ad sales would say that they're getting the most from their space that they can. I'm a little skeptical though because of the way that the newspapers completely missed the boat with online classified ads. Are they really getting the very most from online ad sales?

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  8. Bucholz and Craig- I work in classifieds sales at a large paper, and I think you both make good points. Let me throw in...

    1. B, you're right that newspapers spent a lot of effort convincing advertisers that print space was more valuable than online space. Because from a production standpoint, it is. It costs so much more to create an ad (either by computer or by hand), plate it, get it printed on paper ($$) with ink ($$), folded, collated, bundled, bagged and driven to a subscriber's house. Can you blame a company, especially one that has its own press, for trying to stay in business?

    2. Despite how it looks, print ads are (at least at my paper) cheaper than online ads, when you compare their audience. 190,000 folks get the Sunday paper. 42,000 folks check the site on a Sunday (average, according to the 2007 numbers, the latest full year available). A 3" x 2.5" print ad costs $0.007 per thousand copies. An online ad of the same size costs $33.00 per thousand.

    3. THAT SAID... I'm a total online junkie. I work at a paper, so I subscribe to it, but every single paper goes into the recycling bin. Except for the Sunday crossword. :) I get all my news online, and wholeheartedly agree that if the newspaper as a News Source wants to thrive, it will have to embrace the web. And I think newspapers made a big mistake with how they reacted to the web. So many, including my employer, saw the internet as a flash in the pan or as terrifying competition (My ad dept. didn't even get the internet or email on our computers until 2004!). When they finally offered online ads, they did it reluctantly. And frankly, most of our advertisers got on board reluctantly too. People now realize the immense value of online advertising, but 10 years ago, even 5 years ago, no one could predict the power of the web. And in the mind of an advertiser who's been successfully advertising in print for x years, why fix it if it ain't broke? Online ad space was sold cheap forever for a lot of reasons: it was new and therefore untrustworthy, it was much cheaper to make, newspaper companies wanted people to buy it without balking (many newspaper online sales, especially in classifieds, were and still are add-ons to print sales). And now it HAS to be sold cheap b/c there's always gonna be somewhere a person can advertise free. Craigslist, eBay (not free, but you get my point). Why pay for it if you don't have to, right?

    Also, Craig, the point you make about "Does everyone drink Budweiser because of the ads, or does Budwieser simply have all of those ads because they can pay for them given that everyone is drinking Budweiser?" is totally dead-on, but it's true for all advertising mediums, not just newspapers. The loudest guy gets heard by the most people.

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  9. Ed you said:

    "The thoughts and opinions I read are thoughts and opinions I agree with- why click or subscribe to a blog that doesn't share my values."

    The Op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote an article about this for the NY Times. It also deals with the issue of digital vs printed material. But what I enjoyed most about the article was the importance of being exposed to opinions that you disagree with.

    Here's the link:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/opinion/19kristof.html?_r=1

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  10. Ed,

    Sorry David in Toledo already posted about this. On further thought, I don't enjoy reading opposing view points, it's bad enough to read headlines that make me want to pull my hair out, but I do it anyway. I suppose it's like brussel sprouts, I don't enjoy them, but they're good for you.

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