Ad man: newspapers dying because they make us feel guilty
According to a columnist for the Advertising Age website, newspapers are dying not so much because their advertising model has failed but because they have too much serious content and make readers feel guilty that they can't consume it all.
Simon Dumenco, who writes "The Media Guy" column, writes:
Chances are, if you subscribe to a newspaper and don't have a pre-modern life of leisure, your newspaper actually makes you feel bad too, if you think about it. Issues pile up, often largely unread. You think frequently about the dead-tree obscenity of it all, particularly on Sundays... You probably find yourself quitting pieces after the first few paragraphs, or somehow getting all the way through them and then thinking, "That wasn't worth my time." ... Content written in classic J-school-taught "pyramid style" can seem all the more lumbering and flabby amidst the milieu of crisply written blog posts and zippy data points.
This misses the point so far that it's like... say... arguing that basketball is a stupid game because it's too fast for the average sports viewer to follow, and it employs physical freaks with whom the average viewer can't identify with.
The value of newspapers is not in how entertaining they are, or even in the information they convey. The value of newspapers is that they provide an (ideally) disinterested, unbiased witness to the machinations of government and public and private institutions, without which those institutions could do anything they want -- as in Russia or China. Newspapers create a permanent public record that anyone has access to, and the better the reporting is, the better the record created. When they're wrong, they correct the record -- again, ideally.
The people behind Advertising Age may well make an argument that the advertising model that supported newspapers throughout the 20th century is now invalid and that they will have to figure out other ways to survive. But that can be done without reducing their purported value to that of a cheap crime thriller or reality TV show.
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Comments
On the other hand, I, like you, appreciate depth and think newspapers are the embodiment of serious journalism, and so are necessary to our democracy. But if everybody is reading papers online, how will newspapers make money?
In a sense, it is like the problem musicians have with mp3s. Most everybody will agree that music and serious journalism are vital parts of life, but how can we get money in the hands of musicians and journalists when the physical means of distribution is now so vaporous?
The problem is not that ad revenues have dried up. The problem is that profits have slowed. The newspaper business operated for decades at ridiculous profit margins enjoyed by few other industries in the world. Now those profits have fallen back to earth and in order to stay in the black, we the readers suffer. Thanks to layoffs and consolidation, we get crappier news.
And the waste of paper argument is bogus. All the newsprint we run through our press is 100-percent recycled. Our papers and inks are themselves 100-percent recyclable/biodegradable. And it's not like we're spending extra to be green. Recycled paper is the industry norm and has been for some time.
I think that the future of newspapers is in the St. Pete Times model: a non-profit format. Or a return to individual or family ownership. The publicly traded corporations will be out of the newspaper industry in a decade at the most. And I think we and the newspapers will be better off.
Ad model failure meant weaker revenue; weaker revenue meant cuts; cuts meant weaker product; weaker product meant less reader interest; less reader interest meant less revenue; less revenue meant more cuts; more cuts meant weaker product...
Online product draws interest but not revenue to support product; people look at weaker paper product and say we don't need it and we'll read online; less newspaper readers hurts revenue...