What Should Newspapers Look Like in the Future?
William McKenzie, a newspaperman, poses that question in The Dallas Morning News Opinion blog. Online. It's like he already knows the answer, but can't bring himself to ask the more difficult question, "How Can Newspapers Make a Buck Online?"
Instead, he laments, if newspapers play even more to online readers, "what happens to people (like me) who like picking up a paper every day?" The cruel answer is that eventually they die, leaving the world to people who realize that anything printed on paper is, by the time it's delivered and read, no longer "news," making the word newspaper an oxymoron.
Another DMN editorial board member, Sharon Grigsby, comments that with the proliferation of online news sources, what makes up the op/ed page of a newspaper is changing. She explains how she tries for a unique range of content, while claiming that "what's fresh and interesting is what drives all the decisions." OK, then, how does she explain the regular space devoted to Mark Davis?
Sharon Grigsby's job of choosing content for an op/ed page is now available to every reader. Pick a feed aggregator (aka news reader, RSS reader, etc.), choose content (DMN, Dallas Observer, D Magazine, Dallas Business Journal, KERA, etc., etc.), then sit back and get overwhelmed by content, all collected in the same place, updated automatically. Grigsby's op/ed page and her job as editor of that page, are both already obsolete.
I've long since canceled my subscription to The Dallas Morning News. I had found that there was little in the paper that I hadn't already read online, word for word, either a wire service news story or an opinion column. The only things I turn to The Dallas Morning News for, even online, is *local* news that can't be found elsewhere. The Dallas Morning News seems to be aware of that, but isn't doing much to dominate the only niche left for it in the future.
Rod Dreher offered his own opinion, not as a comment, but as a separate blog post, needlessly forking the discussion. He suggests that something like the Amazon Kindle may be the next phase of newspapering. Perhaps as supporting evidence that he is, as he says, a "troglodyte," he says he was surprised to learn that you can subscribe to newspapers delivered via the Kindle.
Like the others, Dreher misses the point, too. McKenzie, Grigsby, and Dreher seem intent on finding a magic substitute for newsprint, something to let them continue to sell subscriptions to The Dallas Morning News, only delivered electronically to your Kindle (or something) instead of via paper to your front yard. What they miss is that the next phase of newspapering is already here. It's online. How online content is delivered is important, but there won't be a single method. There will be PCs and smart phones and Tivo and Kindles and new technologies like digital ink and portable, flexible display screens the size of newspapers, capable of being folded and rolled, just like... a newspaper.
The real problem for McKenzie, Grigsby and Dreher is that the new technology allows readers to get content from anywhere, to aggregate what they want, to act as their own editors. Nothing is ever going to be invented that will allow The Dallas Morning News to go back to charging the majority of residents of Dallas $250/year to subscribe to the content selected and presented by the team of editors in a building in downtown Dallas. What they should be talking about on the blog is a new business model, not new technology. The technology shift is already well underway. The business model shift? Not so much.
1 comment:
Reportedly, the Hearst Corp. is due to launch a wireless e-reader for periodicals, an Amazon Kindle knock-off if you will. I now give such a strategy more hope. Just like Apple's iPod managed to sell, not just hardware, but music, too, from its iTunes store, it's possible that a Kindle for newspapers might break the public's expectation of getting its news for free online. Excellent hardware, software and marketing is all it takes. That's all.
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