Gillin: sobering news for newspapers

I found this article via IWantMedia (which, amazingly enough, does NOT offer an RSS feed): The coming collapse and rebirth of newspaper journalism. In it, Paul Gillin, a new media thinker, maps a grim future for newspapers over the next 10 years.

The near-total collapse of the American newspaper industry as we know it is inevitable. Anything newspapers could have done to stop it should have been done years ago (Slate recently wrote that newspapers saw this coming in the mid-70s). All the social, demographic and economic trends are lined up against the industry. Over the next decade, there will be agonizing rounds of layoffs, consolidation and bankruptcies. It will be painful to watch, but it will be a necessary process for the industry to reinvent itself.

Gillin devotes much of the article to exploring the various pressures that are being exerted on the news industry. If you don’t think these pressures are real, now’s the time to go back to your hole in the sand and calculate your 401K savings again. If you’ve been reading here for any length of time, you probably know most of the litany Gillin sings.

Some of the changes to the culture of journalism are already being felt:

For one thing, the craft of journalism will evolve to include far more aggregation and organization that has in the past. Editors will assemble their reports from a vast library of resources located across the Internet. Some information will come from paid staff writers, others from freelancers and still more from reports and opinions published by independent third parties and even competitors. Editors will still have a critical role, but their value will increasingly be in assembling and organizing information for readers who don’t have the time to sort through the vast Web.

The craft of reporting will become faster and more iterative. Rumor, speculation and incomplete information will be published far more readily, on the assumption that errors can be corrected. Stories will, in essence, be built in real time and in full public view. Reporters will file copy directly to the Web, often without a review by an editor. Readers will be a central part of the process, correcting and comment upon articles as they are taking shape. Reporting will become, in effect, a community process.

While Gillin’s article reads like an obituary, it ends with rebirth and hope:

This will be nothing less than a complete rebirth of journalism around the concept that information is plentiful and cheap. Instead of 1,500 print newspapers, there will be perhaps five to ten national “super-papers” and many thousands of regional and special interest community news sites. The process of getting there will be wrenching and controversial, but the new model will create a more dynamic and diverse information landscape than we have ever known. It will be incredibly exciting. I hope to be around for the ride.

For college media, the implications are puzzling, frustrating, and exciting. The field our graduates will face is going to be radically different than the one I came into 20 years ago. Their ability to survive and thrive in the new information landscape will be directly tied to their ability to adapt to new media and new job models.

This is partly frustrating for college media because our unique economic situations - while they vary from college to college - shield us from the vagaries of the marketplace, unlike Knight-Ridder or Tribune, two companies who know all too well how the news industry is changing. We can continue to use traditional methods of processing news (news as lecture) for as long as our campuses remain mostly captive audiences and advertisers value our product. Meanwhile, our readers become more attuned to web-based products like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and RSS feeds for news. They may read us on campus, but their attention is elsewhere.

I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather have their focused attention than their momentary distraction on the way to class.

But the industry needs innovators and change agents, and they need new blood to help build new economic models to help new journalistic models survive and thrive. And if we don’t start testing innovation in our campus media, our students will miss out on those opportunities.

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