I wasn't originally going to post this article, but changed my mind one I heard that the Rocky Mountain News is going to close tomorrow (which sucks, one less Broncos news source). So I'd love to hear some opinions on the troubles newspapers are having in general. Somehow, I think Dave will have something good to say.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/realclearpoliti ... rs_survive

Can Newspapers Survive?

Cathy Young Cathy Young – Wed Feb 25, 1:30 pm ET

As media giants totter, battered by the Internet and the economic crisis, saving the newspapers has become a hot topic. It is richly ironic that the online media, which have both greatly facilitated the work of journalists and expanded their readership, have also left many unemployed. Many are expressing concern that the death of journalism as we know it will leave our culture ill-informed - blogs are good for opinion and fact-checking, but they are no substitute for original reporting - and endanger democracy by removing a vital part of its checks and balances.

The debate revolves around two key questions. One, does society truly need the professional media? Two, how can professional journalism survive in a new media environment?

On the first question, my answer is a resounding, though possibly self-serving "yes." While I am a fan of blogs, I believe they work best when the "mainstream media" and the blogs complement each other. Otherwise, the blogosphere is all too liable to disintegrate into shrill partisan screaming and irresponsible rumor-mongering.

The responsible media do have a vital role to play in a democracy. However, the mainstream media's defenders would do well to acknowledge some of their failings. A recent editorial in The New Republic laments that "press-bashing" - whether from right-wing media critics such as former CBS correspondent Bernard Goldberg, or leftists on the Huffington Post site who accuse the media of conformism - has created a "poisonous atmosphere," undermining the authority of the press.

But what if the critiques have merit? Goldberg's anti-media broadsides may be over the top, but his basic argument - that the liberal politics of most journalists influence media coverage, not because journalists don't strive to be objective but because their cultural milieu influences their perceptions of objectivity - has a great deal of truth to it. Few people doubt that Barack Obama got breaks from the press. And there are well-documented instances of media bias leading to sloppy reporting, with journalists all but recycling the press releases of advocacy groups on such issues as domestic violence, homelessness, or the perils of gun ownership. The press has been the target of unfair criticism, but it cannot be absolved of blame for the damage to its reputation.

That said, the media's present financial woes have little to do with its real or perceived lack of balance, and everything to do with the economics of publishing. News corporations have always subsidized serious reporting and commentary with revenues from other functions of the newspapers, such as classified advertising or sports news. Today, most of those functions have been diverted to other media, including the Internet.

Promising solutions include non-profit programs to support investigative reporting and news analysis. Just because we need professional journalism does not mean that it has to come only in the traditional package of the newspaper. Independent journalists, working as individuals or as teams, may thrive if they can have access to resources outside the conventional structure of a media organization.

Far more controversial is the quest to get readers to pay for online content. In fact, there is no good reason that online content should be free, other than "people are used to it." Is it impossible to persuade people to pay for something they are used to getting for free? Not at all. Online music downloads are a good example; so is television. While TV had been free since its inception, large numbers of people proved willing to pay for cable and digital television.

A subscriber-only model for individual websites has repeatedly proven unworkable. (The Wall Street Journal - a notable exception - gets people to pay for financial information while providing most editorial content free of charge.) The main reason it cannot work is that people who read news and commentary on the Internet usually get their content from many different sites. That is the great advantage of the Internet: you can go from The Washington Post to the London Times at the click of a mouse, and follow a link within one story to read another. If every news site started hiding its content behind a pay wall, reader would face either huge bills or greatly restricted choices, and many would seek to circumvent the subscription requirements.

Walter Isaacson, former managing editor of Time, recently got into the fray with a proposal to make web media content available for micropayments similar to iTunes, "a one-click system with a really simple interface." If you see a link to an interesting article on, say, The San Jose Mercury News website, you don't have to buy a $20 subscription to the publication - you can pay a nickel or a dime to read the individual item.

While this is a promising idea, it has substantial drawbacks. Those nickels and dimes can add up, and if your monthly bill is high enough, you may think twice the next time you feel like clicking on a link.

A better approach may be to make news and analysis content available only through media portals or carriers, similar to cable television providers. A subscription to a carrier would give access to any news site (newspaper, magazine, blog) that is a part of its package. The subscription price could vary depending on level of consumption: say, $20 a month for 40 hours of media access, $40 for 100 hours, and so on. Or the cost of a subscription could vary depending on which publications are included, while content outside the customer's standard package could be available for one-time micropayments. Different media portals could experiment with different fee scales. This would allow people to surf the Web without having to ponder each click of a link. Revenues could be distributed to individual websites depending on their readership.

This strategy would still require a drastic departure from Internet business as usual. The migration of participating sites behind media-portal walls would have to be coordinated. Some policing would be needed to ensure that premium content is not reposted on free-access sites. This could make the carriers look like bad guys, at least in the eyes of those for whom free online content has become an entitlement if not an article of faith.

Yet, if there is a will to adopt the media-portal subscription model, there will be a way. Even in the age of celebrity gossip sites and reality shows, millions of Americans still respect real journalism enough to be willing to pay to help keep it alive.

Provided, of course, that the media work harder to deserve and retain that respect.

I prefer reading newspapers than reading shit online, but I don't see them surviving. I get the Hartford Courant, half of it is AP articles and the other half is pretty much reprints from other Tribune papers. I think if these things went really local they could survive. I'd much rather read articles about local news, written by local writers.

I think the RMN shutting down is the first in a domino of many major papers to go down. This has been coming for a long time. I was a communications major in the late nineties and the reason I switched majors is because I was told, if you're not doing stuff online (which I was not remotely comfortable with at the time), then forget about it.

On a more personal note. Even though I've always been a Denver Post guy, it's kind of a weird day here in the metro area. "The News" has been around since before Colorado was a state. It's like your grandfather dying. You realize how much you took him for granted, and you look at his history and it really puts time into perspective.

NY Times will be around forever I bet

The power was out today at my work so instead of looking at news on the internet I read the old-timey paper, and it was really nice. Made my day a lot more relaxed.

blogs and other online media outlets get their news from newspapers, so they really need newspapers to survive otherwise they won't survive.

No they don't.

i can tell you guys right now that working for a newspaper is fucking torture. its like war, you just see friends, coworkers, acquaintances go down like flies around you, bullets whirring. terrifying. everybody's looking over their shoulder as staffs are sliced and the bean counters are asking you to do the same (and more, in some cases) amount of work.

involuntary, unpaid 2-week furloughs, 401K matching program suspensions, wage freezes... its all there man. the only think you can really do is keep your head down, do your work and hope you don't get tagged. im just glad i like the people i work with.

with all of the newspaper layoffs, there are A LOT of qualified reporters floating in the netherworld of blogs these days, doing honest reporting and hoping papers will see it long enough to catch on. the business is in a sad state right now because of its inability to adopt the internet, and now the wheel is rotating to crush the print news industry.

the effed up thing is that demand for news has never been higher, and newspaper websites in particular are racking up record hits thanks to all the bullshit going on. but the people at the top put off its utilization and now its too late to do anything. just have to sit back and watch the ship sink to the bottom.

somewhat like the economy, a lot of the shit has to be purged blindly before the industry can change. unlike the economy, the same retarded administrations will be running the companies in another 4-8 years. its not pretty.

support newspapers people. i don't think the general populace has any idea what's happening to the news industry - i mean really understand the depth and breadth of the impact. if they did they'd pay for news.

the courant is a JRC paper, yeah?

the hyper-local approach has been pretty much the status quo at smaller papers (and what's basically keeping small-town rags alive right now), but there's a chain up there that's been run by the most corrupt horse-shit group for years now, and im pretty sure the courant is like weeks from completely folding.

I'm reading part 2 of Hunter S. Thompson's letters: 'Fear and Loathing in America'. Coincidentally, there's an TV ad here in Ireland for a morning talk radio show. The radio guy says in the ad that they get a lot of their news from newspapers. To me, this means radio journalists aren't really journalists in the true sense of the word. They don't find stories; they don't investigate; they just pick up the morning paper and regurgitate it on-air (granted, I maybe painting with broad strokes and this analysis maybe oversimplified, but fuck it, that's what the geezer says on the TV ad).

Is internet journalism the same, or do online journalists source stories themselves? (more locally, I guess I mean; I know Reuters and the AP exist for a reason) If so, aren't we just losing the format and saving trees by dumping printed journalism? If not, (ie. if internet journalists are like radio ones, mentioned above, then there really is no question, I guess).

Don't know if this makes any sense, but anyhow...

radio guys (or the smart ones) will mostly admit that they're hacks. when's the last time you heard a story broken by a radio guy? the famous ones are famous because they're blowhards or douchebags or make headlines themselves (don imus, rush limbaugh).

internet journalism is different, somewhat. a lot of print journos are going to the internet so its somewhat more founded. there's still a lot of crap though. it's not at all like we're getting a transfer from respectable medium to respectable medium

That's not true. I work for an independent internet-only news org. Although we do get some content from the Biggies, we have our own reporters. And people will pay for news, we get 95% of our $ from reader donations.

people will pay for it only insofar as its convenient and the precedent is there. nobody pays for newspapers online because you don't have to. its as simple as that. if, from the start, newspapers had forced customers to pay for its online content (as they should've done), people would simply expect that and have no issues with it.

Obviously, you didn't read my post...
People do pay for it.

i read yours. did you read mine? who pays for newspaper content online? what newspaper is charging for online access to its articles?

I told you, people donate to us. WE don't require pay. But to say nobody pays for newspapers online is wrong. And the fact that they don't need to pay and can still get the news for free shows it, and yet they still contribute.

Don't they make a pretty penny with advertising content? Would the revenue they receive from charging people to read their material offset the inevitable loss of advertising revenue? And wouldn't it essentially spell doom for your newspaper to charge for content while there are other newspapers that still have free content?

Not sure if your reply was for Parchy or me. We don't have advertisers so we don't make money off that. About 95% is from user donations (not subscriptions). People will be for quality news that they want.

we're talking about different things now. i'm talking about charging for access to things you charge for access to in print editions. not donations. and no newspaper does that. none. i'm sure people pay for news online, but they don't have to. that's the point. newspapers lose millions by basically circumventing the process of paying for anything. why should customers shell out 75 cents for a print edition or $150 for a yearly subscription when everything's online at the click of a button for free? you don't work for a newspaper, it's an internet-only derivative that has no vested interest in print. newspapers operate differently, unfortunately. they've so marginalized the online circles from the word go that it's impossible to charge for anything now. there'd be mutiny among the customer-base, even though it makes complete fiscal and logical sense.