It's no secret that the entire industry is going through a sort of self-flagellating introspection over its future these days. Newspaper readership is on the decline, magazines are folding right and left, the evening news has lost most of its prominence, and so on. Throughout the industry, companies have desperately been trying to figure out how to turn back the tide.
The company that cuts my checks, Tribune Company, even has a C-level executive whose sole purpose is figuring out how to reinvent news media. Tribune's Chief Innovation Officer, Lee Abrams, sends out wild-eyed, company-wide memos about once a week, each detailing the latest newspaper redesign or brainstormed idea.
Like most journalists, I've given the future a lot of thought. And I think the problem is more systemic than we've previously realized. It's the Internet. Sure, that's been said before, but I don't think people realize just how large a problem we're talking about here. Granted, Craigslist and similar sites have all but destroyed the need for classified advertising. And Google can get you any news story you want with the tap of a few keys. But look at the total, bigger picture. What is it that journalists do? Essentially, the journalism industry sells information.
And, sure, people have said that before as well, but they've usually used it as a justification for why journalism will be so important in the coming years -- there's so much information out there now, goes the argument, that we need an entire industry to filter it and find the stuff that news consumers need to know.
To that, I say, horseshit. It's a simple problem of supply and demand. Information has become so commonplace, so readily available, that its value as a commodity has bottomed out. That is the essential problem of the journalism industry today. We are trying to sell something to which everyone already has ready access. It's the equivalent of trying to sell people air... or water.
Despite almost everyone in the United States having easy access to water from their taps, a huge portion of people buy their water instead. In many cases, they buy water even to stock it in their homes, right next to faucets that would pour the stuff for free. Why?
I can think of two reasons. First, bottled water can be taken with you when tap water must be left at home. Second, the marketers of bottled water have convinced many people that their product is far superior to the stuff that comes out of your faucet. Therein lies the future of journalism.
If news professionals wish to thrive in the coming years, they need to make sure that the industry produces a product that can be taken places in which people have no access to cheap, easily obtainable information (i.e. the Internet). With portable Internet access becoming more and more common, this gets more and more difficult, but it's still possible, and has been done in some cases. (Note the relative success of commuter papers to traditional dailies. If we acknowledge that portability is one of the key issues to the future, then broadsheet newspapers should immediately be retired in favor of tabloid, three- or four-page jumps should be ended, and so on. Most editors and designers that read this probably already know the fixes.)
The second issue is the more important one in light of the fact that, eventually, the Internet will be accessible just about everywhere. If newspapers, magazines and even certain segments of broadcast journalism are to have a viable future, people need to be convinced that the information they get in those products is superior to the information they get on the Internet. And that means that newsroom cutbacks, especially in investigative journalism and other areas of exclusive content, have been precisely the wrong thing to do. The focus of marketers should be to convince readership of the ridiculousness of information that comes up at a quick Google search and intelligent people's preference for the alternative. (At the very least, that alternative should be the newspaper's Web site.) Editorial needs to back that up by offering readers content that is both exclusive and superior to other products. In many cases, that doesn't mean that a paper needs to be the first one to report something -- after all, the basic facts of a big story will be available a thousand times over on sites across the Net within minutes of one news organization breaking the story. Indeed, we may need just the opposite -- slow, deliberative work that explains a story better than anyone else can.
But, taking all this into account, there lies a further basic problem: Is bottled water really that much better than the stuff that comes out of the tap? Both are just a couple hydrogen atoms mixed with an oxygen atom, multiplied a mind-bogglingly huge amount of times. Both are drinkable. Both are water. Recently, several cities across the country, including Miami in my own back yard, have started a campaign against bottled water as part of the green movement, encouraging people to use tap water. Bottled water really isn't much better than tap water, and in some ways, it's worse. In that sense, the future of journalism may be nothing but a cheap con game.
Now pardon me while I go self-flagellate awhile.