Perhaps The Most Distressing Finding Of A Recent Major Study About the News Media Is That The Battle Between Journalistic Idealists and The Accountants Is Over, And The Good Guys Lost!

Philip Stone April 3, 2006

“At many old-media companies, though not all, the decades-long battle at the top between idealists and accountants is now over. The idealists have lost.”

So sums up the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) in its recent annual report on American Journalism. And unfortunately, that particular conclusion is not just true in America but across the Atlantic, too.

With newspaper circulation and advertising spiraling downwards the accountants have taken control. They’ll do whatever it takes to continue those 20% plus margins. And since growth of Internet profits lags well behind the advertising losses that print is giving up to the web, then it seems the accountants will continue to have their way. That is, unless they, the newspapers, really start to change their ways.

Good clues on what needs to be done came from a recent study by Outsell, a California-based research and advisory firm, that studied where Americans go to get their news fix each day.

And newspapers score way up there in one important category – local news. Some 61% of Americans depend on their local newspaper to give them local news. But match that with another major statistic from the Outsell survey – that fully one-third of its 2,800 respondents said they had discontinued a newspaper or magazine subscription over the past year. Why did they do that? “Not enough time to read,” was the most frequent response.

Put that together and newspapers will do well to concentrate on local happenings, but they need short brief-to-the-point stories instead on long-winded ones. And which topics are of most interest? The most important seems to be entertainment and things to do, movie reviews, restaurants, family events, sports and recreation, job information and real estate news.

Say, isn’t most of that what has made free newspapers so successful?

The Outsell survey shows that newspapers have one major drawback -- by the time the newspaper shows up on the front doorstep or in the vendor’s news box that news is several hours old. So, according to the survey, newspapers should concentrate on that news that even if it is several hours old it doesn’t matter really since so much of that news is not available elsewhere.

When a major international or national news event occurs a multiplicity of web sites will give chapter and verse of that story before the morning newspaper is off its presses.

Even worse the web’s major news sources are the same news sources as for the newspaper – the national or international news agencies – so except for those times where the newspaper has its own correspondent on that national or international story the words in the newspaper are going to be about the same as they were on the web stories, except the newspaper gets there several hours later; indeed the web probably has new developments before the newspaper is even opened to read.

(That, of course, brings up another discussion which we will save for another day of whether newspapers or even national news agencies today are getting true value for the money they spend on international news agencies when those same international news agencies provide those same stories to the public at large via the web. In the early days of the web it didn’t matter that much, but today it does.)

Where the newspaper can excel, with little competition, is on local news, even inviting citizen journalists in on the act, with all the journalistic complications that might bring. And with true convergence between the print newspaper and the newspaper’s own web site where audio and video can be added to just print text and still pictures on any story, newspapers can flourish in an environment for which they still have little competition.

One of the problems, however, is that those accountants have been winning battles to cut back journalists, rather than editorial having the opportunity to redeploy them. For example the PEJ pointed out that 16 years ago the Philadelphia Inquirer had 46 reporters covering the city. Today it has 24. It also noted that local TV stations and radio have cut way back on their local news coverage.

So the Inquirer, one of those big metropolitan newspapers that seems to be hit the worst of all in the current newspaper slump because they are a bit of this and a bit of that without real identity, could become king of the local news if the reporting resources were there. And the advertisers would just love that!

And that is the battle that still needs to be fought. The accountants want people gone. Editors need instead to get those people redeployed to where they will do the most good – and that means providing the type of news that no one else has the resources to provide – local news.

Converge that local coverage with international and national news on the paper’s web site – they’re already putting share prices there so there is an understanding already that some information is better placed on the web than in print -- and the total package will be one that appeals to readers and advertiser alike.

Let alone the accountants!

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