Let us sit on the ground and tell sad tales of newspapers past

Sam Butler had a post about the demise of newspapers and print (journalism and other printed materials). And just like I am I had to comment. With his encouragement I'm going to make it a post here.

So some background. Sam was discussing this post by Clay Shirky about the death of newspapers and print journalism. Sam pulled this quote, and I think it is the main argument being made here.

"With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem."

This is the same argument about how digital books will replace printed books, the death of music (live performances are still up), the death of TVs, Movies, etc. Digital delivery of books will eventually replace most hard copy (my guess is in about 40 years although there will still be hard copy). While music is delivered differently, it isn't essentially made any differently (although the tools now exist to bypass the music publishing industry, those tools just democratized the function they didn't alter it in any real sense). The same can be said for TV and movies. Made the same basic way, just delivered differently.

Let's just say that since the early 90s I've listened to how the "internet"/"digital revolution" was going to replace print media and give us the paperless office. Since then I've seen print increase to the point that most paper mills churn out cubic miles of laser grade paper at the expense of "real" paper (copy bond just ain't it, you know) which can still be had, but for anything other than "house papers" (the paper print houses buy in bulk for when the client doesn't know how to spec paper, which leads to it's lower cost, which leads more people to select those papers... it's like why most barns are red, because that's the cheapest paint. Why? Because they sell a lot of it to paint barns) you're looking at special orders. Most highly specialized paper is no longer manufactured in the US, you have to ship it from former East Block countries or Asia (which ups the price, which furthers our drive to cheap white copy bond papers). But over all we produce more tons of paper now than we did in the late 80s. So much for the paperless office.

IMHO, if you want to see the real future of newspapers, google the term "hyperlocal." The national and international news are covered by other businesses. I don't watch local TV news anymore. Why? Because it's become a foreshadowing of the National News broadcast that I would watch in just a half an hour. If my local news is covering the fires in Australia, something is wrong. But hyperlocal requires manpower, which is expensive. So most news organizations reprint AP bulletins and rely on phone calls to cover local sports, add in syndicated columns, decrease the very thing people wanted from their paper (including my former local paper the Canton Repository decimating the obituaries page, of which the found out very quickly just how much of a bad idea that was, they changed it back - my opinion, very stupid of them, obituaries are PAID placements, normally not written by in-house staff - although some of them are - WTF were they thinking?).

So without making this a dissertation, here's my comment.

(full disclosure, I work in printing)

So, back when I was doing real design many clients kept on talking about how this "internet thing" was going to replace all catalogs/brochures/business cards (whatever). Those clients that did go all the way saw their businesses stagnate. Those that went halfway, "we'll not print next year's catalog," always ended up printing next year's catalog.

He's cherry-picking points in history and post hoc ergo prompter hocing all the way to his conclusions which explain absolutely nothing except, "The world has changed, we're all going to have to get used to it." Moveable type presses in Europe (and I'm being specific here) came at a time when lots of other movements were coming together. The Renaissance had already begun, the feudal system was collapsing with the rise of guilds, power was shifting from Spain, Germany and Italy to France, England, and Turkey. The enlightenment was a powder keg just waiting for a match, which Martin Luther provided. All of which drove and were driven by printing and the new found wealth of Africa, Asia and the New World (and here I'm limiting myself to Western/European Culture and ignoring most of the rest of the world because he also did in his post).

Newspapers are dying because of a number of factors. While the "Bagdad Bureau" was a part of it, it was only because everybody had to have one, and they did so at the expense of other reporting (like the local council meetings). People want the local news. When that "local news" reports things in Florida, New Zealand and Somalia, it's not as valuable. There are other organs that can do that. Decimating city desks in favor of "glamor" positions and AP reprints also leads to their own demise. Our local newspaper can't spare someone to cover our town's events. Guess what we did when it came time to appoint a paper of record, we went with the lowest cost, highest circulation press. Local sales have gone down, and the newspaper now focuses on communities east of us, all the while bewailing the loss of their subscriptions and revenue from our town.

Advertising dollars are way down. Everywhere. That the "internet" isn't suffering as much from the drop is because there wasn't much there to begin with (internet advertising nearly died six years ago). More money is flowing that way only because the ad execs have to be hip and sexy and the internet is hip and sexy. It's a contact high. Once the businesses start realizing that they can use old metrics to measure the "new media" they'll find out just what their money bought them.

The internet is fabulous when you know what you are looking for. It's horrible when you don't know what you don't know but need to find it. And I've heard the "old economics" arguments before. His view of what "publishing solves" is also very surface. It's like an NPR report I heard on the way home about a non-profit company providing coaches to poorer schools to structure recess for the kids. The reporter gave one of those truisms, "You may not remember it, but somebody taught you how to jump a rope, play kickball, tag, hopscotch, all the games of youth."