May 27, 2006

Newspapers Seek Remedies for Dying Business Model

American Journalism Review looks at all the different ways that newspaper companies are trying to stem the precipitous decline in circulation.

As the Internet gains popularity, analysts suggest it's unlikely that many of those students will eventually take up the newspaper habit. Indeed, with PDAs and cell phones offering news, it seems more reasonable to conclude that the trend away from newspapers will continue. A Scarborough report released in April refers to this as the gathering momentum of the "integrated newspaper audience" - a new metric that measures the combined audience of a newspaper's print and Web readers.

The web is changing some papers' views of what goes on the front page, too...

While there's no concerted effort to reduce the "yesterday" leads, the Internet has accelerated the Times' efforts to make page one fresher, [New York Times Assistant Managing Editor for News Richard] Berke says. "We haven't settled on the perfect formula yet because we don't know what it is," he says. "We want to be current and fresh and distinctive but don't want to overreact when we still sell over a million copies of the newspaper every day."

[New York Times] Executive Editor [Bill] Keller addressed the issues in an online chat in April. The Times, he said, thinks that "stories about how we live often outweigh stories about what happened yesterday. We think it's okay to include in our front-page portfolio something that is fun, human, or just wonderfully written. It's part science, part art, with a little serendipity."

He continued: "The notion of a Page 1 story, in fact, has evolved over the years, partly in response to the influence of other media. When a news event has been on the Internet and TV and news radio all day long, do we want to put that news on our front page the next morning? Maybe we do, if we feel our reporting and telling of it goes deeper than what has been available elsewhere. But if the factual outline - the raw information - is widely available, sometimes we choose to offer something else that plays to our journalistic advantages: a smart analysis of the events, a vivid piece of color from the scene, a profile of one of the central figures, or a gripping photograph that captures the impact of an event, instead of a just-the-facts news story."

"Newspapers" just need to remember that they're in the news business rather than the paper business. One day they won't print the news on paper at all. Some because they're out of business, others because they embraced the digitally converged online future.