The lowly classified ad turns out to be a significant factor in the economic decline of the U.S. newspaper industry. Classifieds were once a major source of income for newspapers. A page jam-packed with little classified ads brought in far more revenue than a splashy full-page ad.
Classified ads have migrated to the Web – where they can usually be placed at no charge and run for an indefinite length of time. Free beats even a small cost, any time. Online, you can sell your car, with pictures, in a searchable database.
Add in the global Web readership that extends beyond local, regional and national borders, and online is the obvious way to go – meaning the old print ads are on the way out. Will the news in print follow?
Alex Jones plays it right up the middle – one might almost say “fair and balanced” -- between hope and despair in Losing The News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy (Oxford University Press, NY 2009; ISBN 978-0-19-518123-4).
Jones is Director of Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy; and he is the Lawrence M. Lombard Lecturer in the Press and Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government. Jones won a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1987 while at The New York Times, for his coverage of the media and of the newspaper industry. So he knows his stuff.
'Adapt or Die'
And he turns a reporter’s unsparing eye on the challenges faced by the news in print since the 1930s and 1940s, when reading the daily newspapers was virtually “compulsory” to know what was happening from down the street to around the world. Newspapers have struggled to survive the challenges from radio news, TV news, cable news, the Internet, and the economic crisis of the past three years.
Jones recognizes that America’s young audiences say they get their news primarily online, though he points out that there’s no certain definition of what that news might be. He dredges up an eerily prescient prediction by the head of an Internet strategy company, included in the famous “Adapt or Die” issue (2006) of The American Journalism Review. Said the strategist: “I think the model of the future may be political news as a video game.
Still, Jones steadfastly maintains that the printed newspaper generates the “iron core” of fact-based, verifiable news that forms the basis for all the commentary about news, from analysis and Op-Ed pieces to talk radio and wailing Web pages.
And his concerns are firmly focused on the future of print news, where business-oriented bottom-liners have increasingly relied on cuts, cuts and more cuts in staff to boost profit margins. The problem, Jones points out, is that iron-core news generally comprises about 15 percent of a newspaper’s overall content, while generating little if any actual revenue. Investigative reporting, a critical component in the newspaper’s mission to serve the public interest, takes the most time, effort, staffing and money.
Help From Poynter Institute, Foundations
To give newspapers a fighting chance economically, outlines some alternative models of ownership and management:
- Foundation support of nonprofit journalism, such as the Poynter Institute in Florida, owner of the highly-regarded St. Petersburg Times;
- Spend money, make top-flight journalism the priority, expect lower profit margins, and treat print and online news as two separate businesses;
- Return of ownership to wealthy families, or groups of well-moneyed civic-minded citizens, like the ownership of The Philadelphia Inquirer established in 2006;
- The “billionaire model,” where a Warren Buffet-type would buy a news organization and endow it with billions of dollars, providing the resources to produce a gold standard in journalism;
- The news co-op, which has been formed in some cities by out-of-work reporters and editors, producing news with commercial potential and without the costs of production and distribution.
Chicago News Cooperative
For example, the Chicago News Cooperative has been set up with several veteran “downsized” reporters and editors. The co-op’s president, James Warren, is the former managing editor and Washington bureau chief of The Chicago Tribune. The co-op’s reporting is featured regularly in The New York Times
Jones is frightened that the “iron core” of news could rust away, without a comparable force to hold government and mega-corporations accountable for their policies and actions. Founding thinkers James Madison and Thomas Jefferson valued access to news and information so highly, they declared that without it, “self-government cannot succeed.” As Jones compellingly demonstrates, the stakes are that high.
Mike Perricone - For nearly a decade, I served as Senior Editor and science writer in the Office of Public Affairs at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory ...
Join the Conversation