There's Something About Print

In 2006, several consumer groups produced a Compendium of Public Interest Research in response to an FCC request for comment on the importance of media ownership rules. Part of the research found:

The traditional local media -- television and newspapers -- are the dominant sources of local news and information. The small number of people who go online for local news and information are likely to go to the Web sites of traditional media...

The Internet is at best a supplement for local news and information that is relied upon by a very small percentage of the population...Among the 11% of respondents who say that the Internet is their first or second most frequent source of news, the websites of local TV and daily newspapers account for about half (51%) of the primary sites they visit most frequently. Sites not affiliated with a traditional media outlet...account for only 17% of the sites visited most and second most. [My bold]

This is bad news for urban dailies like the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News, which announced they would scale back home delivery and offer a digital edition for a fee. More and more local newspapers will likely morph into online "papers," taking only some of the offline audience with them. If these local papers disappear entirely (that is, if their digital versions fail), the evidence suggests that "untraditional" sources like blogs just won't be able to pick up the displaced audience.

Even if Yglesias is right and nonprofits, "amateur experts", and uber-enterprising (he's not kidding -- see NYU Professor Eric Klinenberg's portrait of the contemporary newsroom) journalists pick up the slack, we'll see a decline in attention being paid to local stories (and a decline in the quality of local stories that do make the news).

This is a consequence of James Surowiecki's observation that:

[I]t would not be shocking if, sometime soon, there were big American cities that had no local newspaper; more important, we're almost sure to see a sharp decline in the volume and variety of content that newspapers collectively produce.

Online news is no panacea.

Comments

[larry278]

While information suggests that local news will fact checking will die with ink on paper daily newspapers there is a possibility that citizen journalists will contribute local stories to the web & check their sources & facts. A locality, such as a 1 paper town, might find a larger menu of local stories than the local paper provided. One may never sure of what the future may bring.

[Mekarri]

Other than people losing their jobs at the paper, I say good riddance to bad rubbish. The MSM is poison now and have been for a very long time. You can't trust MSM. Now if we can only figure out how to get rid of talk radio and the idiots on the nightly news show. Then maybe we would have a chance.

[TheIndependenceParty]

I buy a local paper on occasion. At 57 I remember browsing through the printed pages, which grew more devoid of news, and more full of advertising. With the economy closing down, and news available electronically that is, in many cases IDENTICAL to the article online, ... verbatim, there seems little reason for our children to gravitate to newsprint at the end of a driveway, soggy paper-mache' frozen to the MacAdam, for a buck and a half !!!?

Newspapers are doomed for any number of reasons, not the least of which are environmental, for the paper, the inks, and expenditure of energy to deliver a product with such a short life cycle.

Beyond that, true electronic newspapers at an attractive price point and with content appropriate to the medium, have a tremendous number of business opportunities, ... few of which the newspapers have seized upon, a sure sign that they are dying. Their claims in recent years that blogging bears no resemblance to their profession, ... while selling out as rank propagandists to the administration has sealed their fate.

Journalism, on the other hand, will never die. It is as viable as gossip. How it comes to my eye is not my job, but the papers aren't doing it now, ... when they pick up AP feeds, put them on paper, hours after I read them for free online.

When the newspapers create the new medium, ... they will thrive again.

[ObjectiveRealist]

[
[I]t would not be shocking if, sometime soon, there were big American cities that had no local newspaper; more important, we're almost sure to see a sharp decline in the volume and variety of content that newspapers collectively produce.
]

When this happens, I will be very surprised if the average number of Internet news entrepreneurs averages less than two per existing paper media market. In other words, any city that now has at least one newspaper will soon have at least two online newspapers, many of them run by former staffers of existing papers, but no longer constrained by somebody else's editorial policy. It should have happened gradually, but George wasted all our money on an unnecessary war.