Newspapers' Divided Soul

By Stephen Nellis

Think about what fills much of a small local newspaper, and even a good number of once-respectable metro dailies: wire and news-service copy. Editors and designers repackage information from the Associated Press or a newspaper chain service, often brilliantly, and readers pay their hard-earned cash for a hard copy of it.

But by the time it’s landed on the reader’s doorstep the next morning, odds are he or she has scooped the newspaper’s non-local copy by watching television news, listening to the radio, or, ever increasingly, going online to read wire or news-service copy.

So here’s the scoop: Newspapers aren’t going to cut it any longer with stale information that’s merely been repackaged and reorganized. Readers can have the essential facts of a wire story – the who, what, when and where – nearly instantaneously online. And if they can have that free, why pay for a printed paper? As Mitchell Stephens, a New York University journalism professor, writes in the January 2007 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, “Mainstream journalists are making a mistake if they believe their ability to collect and organize facts will continue to make them indispensable.”

Mitchell argues newspapers should move toward providing readers analytic reporting and opinion. By the time the paper comes, he argues, readers already have the facts and want added insight and context. Mitchell carefully reminds his readers that this means journalists must do more reporting, not less.

No more simply going to the board or council meeting, writing down who said what, and coming back to the office to file. Tomorrow’s newspaper reporters will need to be as knowledgeable as their sources, and bring along insight and critical thinking skills to boot. They can safely leave behind any outmoded, just-the-facts sense of objectivity.

That’s not to say traditional, fact-based and lightly sourced news won’t matter. For most local stories there are no wire services to provide the basics before a newspaper can get to them. But no matter how small the community, when readers realize they can obtain all the essentials about, say, a city council meeting from the city’s own Web site, and do so for free, selling them the same information the next day in an inverted pyramid is tough. Certainly, the local newspaper still has to get the basic facts down. But that much can be achieved in a tight and well-crafted nut graph or a well-placed sidebar providing some links or Web addresses.

In other words, we’ll still have to do everything we used to do, but we’ll have to go farther, push harder and dig deeper to make readers think it’s worth their money. Over the long term, it’s simple economics: If newspapers produce something so much better than freely available Web content that readers feel it’s worth the asking price, they’ll buy it. So what newspapers need in order to survive and thrive is higher quality reporting, the kind of work that builds credibility and trust among readers. These are the most valuable assets of any newspaper.

Of course, a call for quality content means paying a salary that would attract the kind of intelligent and motivated people who eager to do deep journalism. Considering many newspapers operate in outright or quasi-monopolized markets, reap incongruously high profits compared to other businesses of a similar scale, and demand those profits continue, such a move could be a hard sell to bean counters who view the human experience in financial quarters instead of lifetimes and generations.

So far I’ve given little attention to the seemingly diametric opposition of print and the Internet. I’ve written of newspapers as though they have no Web sites, and we all know, of course, that they do. But here’s the major problem: Many newspapers are still essentially posting their print publication’s content online. Some newspapers try to lure readers to the print versions of their papers by leaving some stories off their Web sites, usually to no effect other than reader irritation. Still others try to lure readers to their Web sites by providing extra content not available in print. And few newspapers charge money for access to their Web sites, with the Wall Street Journal and selected New York Times content being notable exceptions. Instead, newspapers rely on online advertising and revenues from print versions to pay for their Web sites.

It would seem the business norms aren’t yet established when it comes to a newspaper’s online experience. Indeed, the elusive golden goose of the media business these days is the magic formula for a profitable news Web site. But is it any small wonder no one seems able to make money on with news on the Internet? Americans, if nothing else, are wise with their money: If they can get something, or even most of something, for free, they won’t pay for it.

As we’ve discussed in class, the primary reason Web sites aren’t profitable is that advertisers won’t chunk out the big bucks for them like they will for print media. Advertisers have a legitimate grievance: The numbers aren’t there when they look at the return on their investments in online advertising, and there seems to be evidence that online readers, younger ones especially, can tune out online advertisements in a way that simply has no equivalent in print. But there’s another element to the equation. The news content that draws the eyeballs advertisers so desperately covet is in competition against itself online and in print. And when the online version is free, things look bad for print.

My main point is this: The Internet has divided newspaper journalists against themselves, financially and philosophically. In short, it has pitted the need to know against the need to understand. On one hand, the Internet requires free content posted instantaneously. Readers are therefore hesitant to hand over their money for a print version of the same content and thus demand deeper, more meaningful content from a pricey hard copy.

Here’s my solution: Newspapers should essentially bifurcate their operations, leaving the up-to-the-minute, bare-facts reporting to the Web site and unleashing insightful, knowledgeable reporters on works of analysis and opinion for the print version. It may be useful to think of the relationship between the New York Times daily newspaper and the New York Times Sunday Magazine. Conceptualizations aside, two things are necessary for such a bifurcation to work: The Web site must be timely and accurate enough to compete with wire services and direct sources (such as a city’s Web site), and the print version must be so much deeper and wider in scope that it makes sense to buy it.

The question still looms of whether online advertising will ever catch up with its print counterpart. Removing internal competition for those readers, however, can’t hurt. But more importantly, the time has come for journalists to prove their worth and go beyond the basic reporting that readers can now do independently.

Finally, the good news: Most reporters are eager to transcend a tired, just-the-facts objective journalism. As Mike Levine, executive editor of the Times Herald-Record in Middletown, New York, told the Columbia Journalism Review, “Walk into any newsroom in America, turn the reporters upside down, and a hundred stories will come falling out.”