March 10, 2004, 11.21am • 14 comments » • 1,079 Views

Dead-tree’s dead end

At Online Journalism Review, Vin Crosbie presents a major series on the future of news - and it makes difficult reading for both newspapers and their online counterparts.

Far from opening up new markets to stem the newsprint decline, “the newspaper industry has spent billions on the internet to create online editions that are read by fewer people, less frequently and less fully than print editions”, says Crosbie.

The problem is that, four centuries after the birth of the first newspaper, papers still cater for mass, generic audiences in a one-size-fits-all manner that can never really satisfy individual readers’ interests in enough depth. They have been overtaken by the increasing plurality available in multi-channel television and, certainly, the internet, which - because of its global, many-to-many, connective qualities - exposes readers to a much higher definition of their own interests.

Vin presents the newspaper as an information channel which itself receives a glut of juicy stories through wire services, but which is hamstrung by an old, analog print mindset:

Chances are that no more than four or five stories out of every one hundred published will interest the average reader … The stories that are relevant to each individual reader’s unique interests exist, but aren’t being delivered to him by a generic newspaper … The industry is instead using new media to do the same things that newspapers did 40 - or 350 - years ago.

He’s right on the money. Vin is essentially calling on the newspaper industry to finally and truly realise The Daily Me, a no-brainer concept (Negroponte’s move from atoms to bits should let readers command their own news agenda) which nevertheless has seemingly sunk without a trace in the last couple of years (though My Yahoo! is still flying the flag for personalised news services) and which, perhaps, is quietly re-emerging in the phenomenon of personalised RSS content feeds.

Nothing about merely shovelling dead-tree content online plus re-writing the odd wire story will save newspapers from their increasingly bleak future. Nor even will presses or personal printers that can download the uber-latest stories to fresh, throughout-the-day newsprint editions. Because, ultimately, newspapers will have to break out of the one-size-fits-all, top-down editorial mindset.

Newspapers (The Guardian, Daily Mail) currently rolling out “digital editions” - exact screen replicas of the cumbersome print editions - may be rejoicing that they finally have found a way to make readers pay for content. But the emergence of these services is sad indeed, marking a retreat back to outmoded print thinking. Lumping the newspaper’s pages onto a website will not save the website. If I’m not reading the newspaper now, there’s little that will make me.

Already, I have increasingly little patience in scanning the pages to find just one or two items of interest; tomorrow’s media consumers will have been raised on Tivo, on a dozen rolling news channels, on niche community forums which indulge personal interests with more depth, detail and gusto - on hyper-plurality. Says Crosbie:

If just one of the thousands of local, wire, and news syndicate stories that a newspaper newsroom receives each day is of interest to even one reader and the technologies exist to distribute that story to that reader, then it should be the editor’s responsibility to satisfy that reader - the mass customization of each day’s edition. It makes no sense to transplant the generic publishing limitation of the analog press into 21st century media.

This rekindles that old argument about The Daily Me of course - if a reader can tailor his news consumption only to his narrow field of interests, won’t he be ignorant of the important, big stories of the day?

That, of course, is an editor’s mindset, and the evolution of newspapers toward personalisation requires the transfer of editorial power from editors to readers, the usurping of the editor as the supreme gatekeeper to what is important.

But surely there is a balance to be found? I would contend a future news product should satisfy readers’ interests by mining the rich plurality of the world’s content reserves, while attempting to draw special attention to the stories readers should perhaps not gloss over immediately.

Editors’ jobs will change, requiring they both package an array of heterogenous news stories and direct readers toward stories they regard as crucial, important to the masses - their judgement calls on what constitutes “important” will matter more than ever.