Rich Cameron digs up this defense of the supremacy of newspapers from a surprising source: a college student.
But I think there are huge faults in Greg Finley’s reasoning.
Take, for instance, this:
But doesn’t conventional wisdom tell us it’s only a matter of time before the Internet makes newspapers a thing of the past? It shouldn’t. The Internet will fail to topple newspapers for the same reason radio and television failed: Its immediacy is offset by its shallowness.
No other medium can match newspapers’ depth. For years, big news events would be reported on radio and television soon after they happened, but older people have been more than willing to pay a few coins to read the details the next day.
There is an enormous problem with equating the Internet with “shallowness.” The Internet has an indefinite news hole. Space on a news site is limitless, as opposed to the 40-50 percent news hole in a daily newspaper. Not only that, but Web sites can provide links to source documents, full-length interviews with newsmakers, additional material from other news sources. Can a newspaper do that?
The newspaper can’t hold a candle to the web’s potential for depth. Is there shallow reporting on the Internet? Sure. Is there shallow reporting in a major daily newspaper? Pot, meet kettle.
In fact, I would argue that most of the “shallowness” that shows up on Internet news sites is a function of the “shallowness” of the reporting that occurs for the printed product, since there is a whole lot of the news industry that still believes in shovelware.
The crux of the problem with the copy editor’s reasoning is the equation of the news organization with the medium. Compare the New York Times’ coverage of 9/11 (still available online) with the printed version of the same coverage - if you can find that printed version. Find out some new information? Update the article online. Can you do that in the newspaper so that people who read the original article can then find out the new information? Um, no.
Or take the Washington Post’s “Faces of the Fallen” project. Shallow?
For a better idea of just what kind of “shallowness” the Times provides on the Internet, check out the Times’ Multimedia page.
Then there is the mistaken notion that news sites are providing content “for free” to other sites like Google News.
News Web sites rely almost exclusively on newspapers and wire services to provide their content, and they give back little in return. Without newspapers doing the legwork, is Google News going to hire a horde of reporters to pick up the slack?
If newspapers stop providing news Web sites with free content, then the profits will return to the hard-working reporters instead of going to the lazy search engines.
The problem with this suggestion is the idea that Google News and the other news aggregators are not driving people back to the individual news organizations. If I see a headline about North Korea on Google News, I have to click the hyperlink to read the story, and that puts me back on the web page of the site that hired the reporters in the first place. Additionally, news aggregators are paying for the content they index.
There are a couple of other arguments that need to be addressed as well:
Newspapers’ Web sites are annoying for readers, but they will prove to be kryptonite for the newspapers themselves. The editor of The Modesto Bee told me that online advertising accounts for roughly 5 percent of the paper’s revenue. If print journalism becomes obsolete, I can’t imagine online revenue will be able to keep the newspaper afloat.
This is actually a valid concern, and one the newspaper industry is struggling to address. But it is bad logic to assume that taking content offline is going to drive people back to the print product. They may just decide that it isn’t worth the bother. And if the advertising continues to head online (as in classified advertising, real estate, and automotive), then it won’t matter how much a newspaper keeps out of the online world, the dollars will continue to disappear.
But there is also the question of how much the Modesto Bee (or any newspaper ad department) is devoting to generating quality ad dollars online. Let’s face it, if your ad staff is selling online as an “added benefit,” then it’s not going to be a huge part of your total ad revenue. And there’s the matter of commissions. If I were selling ads, would I want to sell the $20 banner ad, or the $200 2×5?
As a side note, I have yet to see any type of cost breakdown on the amount it takes to produce, print, and distribute a daily newspaper as opposed to the amount it costs to put that newspaper online. Or a discussion of the environmental impact of distributing that daily print edition as opposed to the environmental impact of putting all that content online. I suspect that it costs a great deal less to put the product online.
Finally, there is the argument from age (aka, the rose-colored glasses scenario):
As they become more mature, many people begin to fall in love with the newspaper, but that can only happen if they are exposed to it. I try to read The Orion and other newspapers before class as much as possible, and almost invariably, someone will ask to see the comics, the sports or whatever else.
Perhaps these students are reading because they’re bored waiting for class? That hardly seems like evidence that these folks would drift into daily news subscribers when they became more “mature.” I’m approaching 40, and I don’t read a newspaper unless I am stuck in an airport without wireless access. I advised a student newspaper for five years, and that was the only news*paper* I read many weeks. And yet, I’d take any current events quiz you can give me.
Ultimately, this copy editor’s plea is the modern example of the ostrich syndrome: if we just stick our heads in the sand, maybe it’ll all blow over. But paradigm shifts don’t work that way. The changes wrought by the Internet and Web-based news delivery are not an adaptation as was the advent of television or radio. The Internet transformation is akin to the invention of the printing press - a radical break with the past.
It would be nice if newspapers had the luxury to ignore this massive shift. But I don’t think they can. They’d be fools to try to.
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