E&P top 10’s missing number 1

Advisers and students interested in journalism will want to read the Editor & Publisher story on the top newspaper stories of 2006: Strupp’s Top 10 Newspaper Industry Stories of 2006. In it, Strupp tags “The Internet coming of age” as the top newspaper industry story.

As Mark Potts notes, that’s old news. The Web came of age long ago - at least as far back as 2004, when bloggers were given press credentials to both major political conventions. If anything, broadband access came of age this year. What did happen in 2006 was that huge segments of the industry seemed to “wake up” to the new kid on the block. As Mindy McAdams said in an interview earlier this year:

The professionals seem to have very suddenly got the news flash that they need to start producing multimedia and lots of it. Why they never thought so before, I don’t know. And why they suddenly woke up from a Snow White-like sleep, I can’t tell you. Whatever the reason(s), just in the last 12 to 18 months, it seems like they finally get it.

Potts summarizes the omission in the story:

No, the problem with Strupp’s list is that the biggest story of the year in the newspaper industry is that everybody in the industry seems finally to have figured out that the industry is in very serious trouble, and the upheaval that’s resulted from that realization in the past year has been nothing short of massive. Hints of that upheaval, in fact, are all over Strupp’s list: The dissolution of Knight Ridder, continued job cuts, Tribune Co.’s problems—all of those are symptoms of the greater story, which is an overall decline in the industry’s fortunes. Just look at the daily list of industry headlines on Romenesko—lately, it seems, they’re almost all bad economic news. (And there’s another clue today, in Alan Mutter’s excellent analysis of Borrell stats that show that internet recruitment advertising spending has surpassed print spending.)

And Potts, a veteran journalist now in the silicon industry, is pretty clear that this story is going to continue being top of the list for the near future:

That’s not going to end with the playing of “Auld Lang Syne.” We’re going to see more of the same—much more—in 2007 and beyond. That’s the biggest newspaper industry story of 2006: By all indications, the industry has reached the end game. And with major structural and philosophical changes (sure to be the biggest industry stories of 2007, 2008 and beyond) it’s going to be ugly. In fact, it already is.

And Potts is not alone. Almost every day, I read from a variety of industry sources that the face of newspaper media is changing. This is a challenging time that is going to test some very deeply entrenched beliefs about who we are and what we do. The survivors will be those who adapt to the challenges and overcome them. That includes everything from information centers to “mojos” to multimedia to citizen journalism and a whole lot more.

For college media, this means we need to find the energy to start innovating, and soon. The glacier that is the newspaper industry (and broadcast is in a similar situation) is beginning to move. We can either move with it (ideally ahead of it), or we can get left in the wake. I’m all for moving ahead in 2007.

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