A Bright Future for Newspapers
Paul Farhi, American Journalism Review
Philip Meyer, who has studied the newspaper industry for three decades, can see the darkness at the end of the tunnel. If present readership trends continue indefinitely, says the University of North Carolina professor, the last daily newspaper reader will check out in 2044. October 2044, to be exact. “I use that as an attention-getting device,” says Meyer, whose latest book, “The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age,” spells out the bad news in elaborate detail. “It’s shocking, but that’s what the numbers say.”
It’s not hard to understand how we could get from here to there. The media have been covering the bad news about newspapers for years. To see and read these accounts is to encounter an industry that seems on the verge of crisis, and possibly on the edge of the abyss. “In many U.S. markets, the dominant paper is a fading enterprise,” wrote Slate media critic Jack Shafer this spring. “In the long run, no newspaper is safe from electronic technologies.” Barron’s Online columnist Howard R. Gold put it this way recently: “A crisis of confidence has combined with a technological revolution and structural economic change to create what can only be described as a perfect storm… [P]rint’s business model is imploding as younger readers turn toward free tabloids and electronic media to get news.” The Washington Post was more succinct: “The venerable newspaper is in trouble,” it declared in a long feature story in February.
Wait a second. Newspapers, which predate the founding of the American republic, are “imploding,” “in trouble” and staring at oblivion? Is the future really so bleak?
To be certain, all is not as well as it once was at the average daily. Circulation, which has been on an orderly downward trajectory for two decades, has lately shown signs of free fall. (Daily newspaper circulation dropped 1.9 percent in the last year, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations numbers.) Young readers are scarce, newsroom budgets are tight, and the competition remains unrelenting. Newspapers have wounded themselves with a series of credibility-shredding scandals and screwups – from Jayson Blair’s and Jack Kelley’s fictions to Judith Miller’s mistaken WMD stories to last year’s Enron-style circulation-inflation mess. The Internet, with its vastness, its vibrancy and its immediacy, does seem poised to blow away the snoozy old newspaper.
And yet all of this misses a bigger, more positive picture. Media accounts of the rise and fall of newspapers are greatly exaggerated, if not flat wrong. The case for the survival of the daily paper is at least as compelling as the one for its much-reported demise. Considering the hurricane of change that is buffeting all segments of the news media these days, I’d argue that no part of the business is as firmly anchored as the average daily newspaper. Rather than accepting their own mortality, newspapers may have the best chance of any of the old media to survive in a new-media world.
All of the pessimistic assessments of the newspaper industry’s future invite a simple rejoinder: Compared with what? Since all traditional media–newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, etc.–are gradually losing readers, listeners and viewers, assessing any single medium in isolation provides a flawed and distorted picture. Compared with the rest of the media industry, newspapers are doing no worse, and in some respects quite a bit better, than the competition, including the Internet.