An interesting thread over at SportsFilter got me to put down something I’ve been thinking about for awhile now regarding the future of US printed newspapers. The SpoFi thread, inspired by Matthew Yglesias’s blog post at The Atlantic, was specifically about the local sports page but I think the broader question is more useful to consider. This is a slightly edited version of my comment in that thread. Remember, I’m not just a web guy; I also have a BA in journalism (for what that’s worth).
One development I expect to see in the US–and probably Canada too, though I’m not familiar enough with European newspaper ownership to know if this will be true there–is the big national ownership groups, e.g., MediaNews, Gannett and Tribune, will consolidate writing staffs. Between the falling (death spiraling?) revenues and increasing newsroom pink slips (the San Jose Mercury News, for instance, has half the staff writers now as were there a year ago) I think there’s no other solution and I’m surprised not to have read this yet from any media pundits.
What I mean by consolidation is that instead of each paper having their own staff TV, book, music and sports writers, each chain will pick the smallest number needed for a particular beat and use them across all its papers. So probably one or two TV, book, music and media writers nationally plus perhaps one to cover explicitly local material. Business and tech can be handled similarly, except in markets like Silicon Valley and New York that can justify local hiring from area-specific revenue.
Sports is different. Plenty of people buy newspapers for sports alone. That doesn’t mean one cannot realize efficiencies by having, chain-wide, just enough sportswriters to have one on hand at any given event, rather than one or more local staff dedicated per team, plus a small number of columnists (though not necessarily local). So each local market would have proprietary written stories on their own teams, albeit not necessarily by the same writer all season long. More important, this would open budget for writers to be assigned to local sports, high school, college and so on, which are IMO generally under-covered now but would attract substantial readership.
The Long Run
Printed papers will be around for perhaps 10-15 more years tops even if they make major changes such as what I’ve suggested; the iPhone is a harbinger of what’s to come tech-wise that leads to this. For now the screen, nice as it is, is too small and the devices are a tad too expensive to replace printed papers for most people. Virtual displays, though, are almost at the mass market price point of under $200, perhaps 24-30 months away from it, and then the ocean wave will begin to swell; prices for highly usable, always-connected devices will follow the normal price v. time on market curve ever downward.
But my prediction is only for the printed version of the paper. The big chains–and here we have to add in the likes of the New York Times Company and Dow Jones/News Corp–still have the chance to make their dosh on creating journalistic content, if their execs can make the leap in understanding and build defensible web properties out of the (sorry) substandard hash that is today’s standard newspaper website.
Of course in this time frame, we’re also no longer talking about newspapers competing against just other newspapers (if we ever were) but other companies that deliver similar information in other formats. That is, magazines delivering topical content and radio/television as well; perhaps not radio so much as, other than NPR, those companies no longer deliver much in the way of original reporting.
No doubt these companies are in for a long, strange trip. Technology is the creative destructor par excellance which, as Wikipedia says, destroys the value of established companies despite their having enjoyed some degree of monopoly power.
BillSaysThis 