Newspapers can be replaced.
Don’t get me wrong. I love newspapers. I have spent my adult life (and the later years of my youth) working in the newspaper industry, starting as a carrier. Old newspapers hang on my office walls and fill my cabinets and file drawers. I believe that pretty much any mediocre newspaper is still the best news outlet and advertising vehicle in most any community.
But I am concerned by a conceit I hear and read too often from journalists and newspaper executives hoping to get by with incremental approaches to innovation. It certainly underlies the notion that if newspapers suddenly all started charging for content, the freeloading public would have to buckle and start paying. These people dismissively proclaim that their communities would suddenly starve (or pay) for news and information if the newspaper went out of business or its content vanished behind a paywall.
Mark Potts, a former Washington Post staff writer whose Recovering Journalist blog is one of the best about the changing newspaper business, wrote recently about his presentation at a panel in Baltimore, titled, “The End of Local News? If Communities Lose Newspapers, Who Will Fill the Void?” Mark made the point that the void is already being filled by a robust mix of general-interest and niche providers of digital information about Baltimore.
The panel was based on the premise that some metro newspapers might stop publication entirely. But you can apply the same reasoning to the possibility (increasingly a probability) that newspapers will hide substantial parts of their content behind paywalls, available only to paying customers.
I asked Gazette Web Curator John McGlothlen to compile a similar list for me of news sources covering Eastern Iowa, other than those operated by Gazette Communications. We’re not Baltimore, by any stretch. The metro area has almost as much population as the whole state of Iowa. Still, John compiled a long list of television stations (KGAN, KWWL, Iowa City Public Access Television), radio stations (KCJJ, WMT, Iowa Public Radio, Radio Iowa), community sites and blogs (Eastern Iowa News, Neighborhood Network News, Coralville Courier), state blogs (Iowa Independent, IowaPolitics), special-interest blogs (FromDC2Iowa, Essential Estrogen, John Deeth blog, Marion Contrarian, Hawkeye Review, Iowa Theatre) and live public safety scanners and archived audio (Linn County, Johnson County).
This isn’t an exhaustive list of news sources. Other newspaper sites include Iowa City Press-Citizen, The Daily Iowan, Corridor Business Journal, Corridor Buzz, Marion Times, Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier, Dubuque Telegraph-Herald, Quad-City Times, Des Moines Register and smaller community newspapers provide digital content as well. And the list doesn’t include personal bloggers who tell about the slices of the community that interest them, companies, government agencies and organizations that communicate directly with the public and hundreds of local Twitterers.
And, of course, we have no shortage of Hawkeye-focused sites and blogs, in addition to Hawkeye content on several of the sources listed above: All Up, Black Heart Gold Pants, Fight For Iowa, Hawkeye for the Queer Guy (and everyone else), Hawkeye Hideout — A growing Hawkeye community, Hawkeye House, Hawkeye Sports — The official site, Hawkeye Sports News, IowaHawkeyes.net, Scothawk.com — Hawkeye video heaven, Stormin Spank’s Hawkeye Ramblings, HawkeyeNation.com, HawkeyeReport.
Lots of the sites link to content produced by The Gazette and other traditional media organizations. But many are providing unique new content and some offer a mix (as they should) of original content and links. I think our company’s products offer a wider range of useful content for the communities we serve than any of these sites.
But newspaper companies should not let that common situation lure us into thinking and acting like monopolies. I don’t point out all these sites to send traffic there, rather than to GazetteOnline, kcrg.com and other sites our company owns. But the truth is that we already compete for attention with all those sites. And if we were to suddenly wall our content off, making it available only to those willing to pay, some of those sites would start offering more and better content, to attract the users who would leave us.
A newspaper is a valuable and leading community voice. We need to protect that role by extending the reach and impact of the voice. Lots of other voices will speak up if we start to act like we’re the only voice.
Reminds me of a comment Steve Yelvington made at a conference in Minneapolis a week ago: News organizations need to accept being part of a herd. A smart one will seek to be the alpha, but collaborate.
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Exactly. If you know you’re part of a herd, you try to stand out in positive ways, providing better service and more value, rather than starting to charge in foolish ways.
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The key question, as you point out, is how much original information is produced by the sites you mention, and how much of it is originated from newspapers. The funny thing is, this is an empirical question which could actually be answered by a content analysis and / or social network analysis. There’s no reason why we need to keep speculating about these things, the data is available and only needs someone to crunch the numbers.
Here’s an interesting metric from the Daily Kos, “Where We Get Our Information.”
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/4/15/719947/-Where-we-get-our-information
“While newspapers were the most common source of information, they accounted for just 123 out of 628 total original information sources, or just shy of 20 percent.”
There’s no reason why this type of study couldn’t be done locally, and in a more rigorous fashion.
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[…] Online news sources abound in most communities […]
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