Fresh from a farewell dinner for departing New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt, the paper’s standards editor, Phil Corbett, issued a memo to the newsroom yesterday on that perpetually controversial issue: use of anonymous sources. Full memo below.

August 31, 2010
A Reminder on Anonymous Sources

Phil Corbett offers a reminder and some suggestions on our use and description of anonymous sources.

At a farewell dinner for Clark Hoyt, a number of editors once again discussed our use of anonymous sources. And we agreed, yet again, that we often stray from our own guidelines.

Time for another reminder and some new suggestions. (This memo echoes and reinforces our 2004 Confidential Sources Policy, as well as follow-up memos from Bill in 2005 and 2008. Jill also addressed the issue for readers in a Talk to the Newsroom feature.)

The most common problem actually involves one of the less crucial aspects of our guidelines – the question of what explanation, if any, we offer the reader for why a source wants to be anonymous. So I’ll deal with that issue first. Then I’ll briefly re-emphasize the most important parts of our rules.

Why the Source Is Anonymous

Pat, formulaic expressions of why an anonymous source wants to be anonymous are probably worse than no explanation at all. They are uninformative and give readers the impression that our anonymity rules are on autopilot.

Saying that a source insisted on anonymity because he was “not authorized” to speak is usually stating the obvious, and is of little or no help to a reader. Yet we’ve used that formulation nearly 300 times in the past year.

Let’s stop using such rote formulas as “because he/she was not authorized to speak …” or “because of the sensitivity of the issue.”

In lieu of such boilerplate, reporters and editors should in all cases discuss why the source wants anonymity, and consider seriously whether we can say something informative or interesting.

When warranted, a thoughtful sentence or paragraph, describing the pressures or concerns of the people involved in a situation, may give readers greater insight than a terse phrase. In other cases, a shorter explanation may be useful, but only if it conveys some real information. Here are some examples that would be enlightening and worth including:

- “out of fear for his safety.”
- “out of fear of retaliation from X.”
- “because parties to the negotiations had promised to keep them confidential.”
- “because the company has threatened to fire workers who speak to the press.”
- “because Politician X insists that his aides not speak to reporters.”
- “to avoid antagonizing Official X.”
- “because disclosing grand jury testimony can be illegal.”

Of course, in all cases we must take care not to inadvertently violate the agreement to protect a source’s identity.

If the reason for anonymity is obvious, or we can’t shed any light beyond the fact that the source is unwilling to be named, we should simply describe the source as clearly as we can and leave it at that.

The Source’s Credibility

As Bill and others have emphasized before, the more crucial question for the reader is how to judge the source’s credibility. So we should say as much as we can about how the source knows the information. Was he at the meeting? Did she work on the legislation? Have they seen the document?

We should also give as clear an idea as possible of what motivation, bias or interest the source has in the issue. Does she favor/oppose the bill? Was he fired by the company? Have they tangled with Official X in the past?

Informing Editors

Remember that under our rules, at least one editor must know the identity of an anonymous source. (As standards editor, I do occasional spot checks to make sure this policy is being followed.) Some desks make it a regular practice to put a note on a story indicating what editor has discussed the sources with the reporter.

Overuse of Anonymous Sources

A final reminder, on the most basic point. While anonymous sources are sometimes crucial to our journalism, every time we rely on anonymity, we put some strain on our credibility with readers. As all our guidelines emphasize, we should resort to anonymous sources only for newsworthy information that we can’t report any other way. Anonymity should not be invoked for trivial, obvious or tangential information, or for quotes that add little of substance. And it should not be used as a mask for personal attacks.

Let me know if you have questions.

Phil Corbett
August 2010

10,000 Words :: The multimedia tools I actually use (and you should too)

July 26, 2010

Debunking the Replacement Myth

The tired idea that born-on-the-Web news sites will replace traditional media is wrong-headed, and it’s past time that academic research and news reports reflect that. Jay Rosen, the New York University professor and media critic, calls them “replaceniks,” and it’s an apt term. Rosen is talking about people who insist on evaluating new, born-on-the-web news outlets as potential replacements for established news organizations, such as your local newspaper. As if.

As if the new online publishers are trying to replace the local traditional outlets. As if newspaper-centric standards of dailiness and comprehensiveness matter the way they did pre-Web. As if citizens can only turn to one or the other type of outlet amidst a vast and diverse emerging new ecosystem and only one type of news site will prevail.

As one online publisher, Timothy Rutt of AltadenaBlog, said in comments on a recent Time story about local news start ups:

I think those of us who run community news sites know that we’re not the only source of our reader’s news. I HOPE our readers are continuing to read newspapers for state and national politics, pro sports, etc. Our niche is covering the important parts of everyday life in a community that larger scale operations tend to ignore—for us, that means church fundraisers, local concerts and art gallery events, wildlife sightings (when a cougar is sighted in your neighborhood, you want to know!), etc.  Sometimes we’re your best source—recently the cops shut down several streets because a suicidal man was sitting in his car with a gun.  We covered that in real time, as people wanted to know why the helicopter was buzzing, why the streets were closed, etc. Readers on the scene—hunkered down on their floors—sent us dispatches.  We’re a small community without its own radio or TV station, but our site was able to keep people informed as it was going on live.

Steve Buttry, the Director of Community Engagement at the Washington, D.C start up TBD.com and recent Editor & Publisher Editor of the Year, offers a strong analysis of the shortcomings of one recent study, ““Comparing Legacy News Sites with Citizen News and Blog Sites: Where’s the Best Journalism?” from University of Missouri researchers in “Academics measure new media (again) by old media yardstick”.  (Post includes the Missouri study and a response from Margaret Duffy, a respected Missouri researcher.)

Buttry wrote:

For academics studying whether “citizen journalism” is going to “replace” traditional journalism, let me save you some time: It won’t. It’s not trying to. It shouldn’t.

Journalism is not, never has been and should not become a zero-sum game.

I share Buttry’s criticisms. I think such studies fail to assess other sources of news and information, and I think these all complement, rather than rival, traditional news media. Also, a traditional newsroom of any size is going to produce consistently better journalism than a lone blogger but I think overlooks the idea that it only takes one determined digger to uncover an important story that a larger outlet might miss.

I pushed back at a similar study, also from the University of Missouri, where I recently completed a one-year fellowship at the Reynolds Journalism Institute. The Project for Excellence in Journalism invited my comments and I responded in February with an essay that said:

… the new news ecology is dizzying. As it develops in ways and with a speed we can’t predict, the requirements of academic research may leave out the context of a rapidly changing environment. As a result, this new research could be read to reinforce the out-of-date idea that citizen news and professional news are in competition.

If professionals and nonprofessionals were ever producing news and information as distinctly separate groups, this is becoming less so every day. They’re merging. They’re joining forces in exciting experiments that will help shape the future of news, information and civic engagement.

I also added my own community news research to my fellowship activities. I decided to evaluate as many new local sites as possible against a very simple set of criteria (drafted with Jay Rosen’s help) that included producing original news; attempting to be accurate, fair and transparent; and working on a sustainable revenue model. My research partner, Missouri PhD student Adam Maksl, and I reviewed more than 1,200 sites, including sites on which the Missouri study for PEJ was based.

The result was a list of what I called “promising” online news sites, ones that are starting to figure things out. Perhaps not surprisingly, most of the sites on the list are run by or employ journalists, often working with citizen contributors, local nonprofits and foundation seed funding. At the same time, most put a very high priority on citizen engagement, more, I believe, than traditional news outlets typically do. That doesn’t mean these sites don’t struggle, especially with business and revenue aspects.

My point was to give us something specific to talk about rather than a replacenik either/or abstraction. I wanted to help us begin to understand what local news start ups may be able to accomplish and how we might help them do that. I also thought such a list might help some traditional news organizations think about how they might form local partnerships that would help provide better news and information to their communities. I reject the notion that there is only one solution for bringing news and information to communities. While established media may be an important part of any solution, I also reject the idea that effective ways of producing and delivering journalism must look just like what’s gone before.

My work bumped up against another replacenik offering last week, this one from Time magazine under the headline: “Are Hyperlocals Replacing Traditional Newspapers?”

As if. Or as John Paton (@jxpaton), CEO of the Journal Register Co. and 2009 E&P Publisher of the Year, tweeted: “Interesting Time story but headline shows the zero-sum attitude of those who don’t understand the new news ecology.”

Apparently the writer also didn’t understand what I told him about my research. Or perhaps my comments had to conform to the replacenik frame of the story. The result: My research conclusions were misstated.

According to Time, I “concluded that 1 in 10 hyperlocal sites is producing “good” content, some good enough to give traditional journalism a run for its money—sometimes literally.”

My response in the comments-

To clarify: I did NOT find or say that only one in 10 hyperlocal sites are “good.” I never made such an assessment.

First of all, I looked at a range of sites, not just hyperlocal ones. Out of more than 1,200, about one in 10 met a very specific list of criteria I developed, and I described them as “promising.”

List: bit.ly/micheleslist.

Criteria: http://bit.ly/sitecriteria

I think it’s impossible to use a blanket characterization of “good” or not. Is a site good if it’s useful? Is it good if it has a large user base? Is it good if journalists think it is? You get my drift. That’s why I tried to be very specific in my criteria.

As well, I did not say these sites give traditional media a run for their money. I don’t know that. I think it would vary from community to community and depend on a variety of factors that I did not study.

I also have said that IF nine out of 10 local news sites are not very good, as other research has asserted, then I think it’s valuable to study the other 10 percent to learn what they can teach us and support them. That’s what we’re doing at Block by Block: Community News Summit 2010 in September. Link: http://bit.ly/BlockByBlock

Ironically, the article cited the West Seattle blog as its example of “giving traditional media a run for their money”. As it happens, the West Seattle Blog has a content partnership with The Seattle Times.

The article also refers to the Knight Foundation as a “a nonprofit journalism organization,” which is sort of like calling a Mazerati “a car.” (Disclosure: I do consulting for the Knight Community Information Challenge, which funds community news start ups, and for the Knight journalism program.)

I e-mailed the Time writer, Gary Moscowitz and flagged my comments about how I was quoted. Here’s his response:

Thanks for the heads up, and thanks for posting your comment. The 1 in 10 comment got much debate from me throughout the editing process, but they seemed to be intent on keeping it. The “give them a run for their money” I know are not your words verbatim, just us paraphrasing.

So there it is. While I don’t buy into replacement thinking, indulge in this comparison: Many fledgling news sites do a better job of accuracy than Time managed on this story.

Pasted from <http://www.knightdigitalmediacenter.org/leadership_blog/comments/20100726_the_replacement_myth/>

Newspapers

By the Project For Excellence In Journalism and Rick Edmonds of the Poynter Institute

Summary Essay

Poynter Institute ethicist Kelly McBride was visiting former colleagues at the Spokane Spokesman-Review last summer, when the conversation slid into the how-bad-is-it? mode.  It has gotten so bad, one journalist said, that the independent contractors who deliver the paper are complaining that the Monday edition doesn’t have enough throw-weight to get all the way up the porch.

That’s our metaphor for the state of the industry early in 2010.  Newspapers, contrary to what is frequently alleged, are not dying in droves. Only half a dozen of any size went out of business, and most of those were second papers in their market. More papers, nearly 100, cut back at least one day a week, but most of those were very small.1

But far too many American papers are at risk of becoming insubstantial.  They lack the heft to be thrown up the front porch or to satisfy those readers still willing to pay for a good print newspaper.

As they shed circulation at an accelerating pace, they lose value to advertisers.  Worst case, the industry could simply keep shrinking, stall out as a business and be left without resources to reinvent itself.

The recent financials certainly have been ugly. Advertising losses, averaging 26% in 2009 (on the heels of a cumulative 23% loss the previous two years)2 left newspapers downsizing everything – the physical dimensions of the paper, the space devoted to news and, most painfully, their roster of news professionals.

By our calculation advertising revenues fell 43% over the three years.3

Roughly 13,500 jobs for full-time, newsroom professionals disappeared during that period, the total falling from 55,000 to 41,500, a count which includes some 284 new jobs at some online-only newspapers now included in the industry’s tallies.  That means that newsrooms have shrunk by 25% in three years, and just under 27% since the beginning of the decade.4

To put it another way, newspapers headed into 2010, devoting $1.6 billion less annually to news than they did three years earlier.5

Business prospects for 2010 are marginally better.  The advertising losses and the need for further cutting will be less extreme.  With price increases at many papers, circulation revenues are trending up modestly, even as paid circulation numbers continue to decline steeply.

Online advertising revenues should begin to grow again in 2010, and newspapers may find a way to tap profitably into emerging markets like news to mobile devices.  Incremental growth, however, seems far more likely than a surge that will transform the business and facilitate a complete switchover from print to digital. After 15 years of transition, about 90% of newspaper company revenues still come from the print business.6

Circulation losses at daily papers seem to have peaked at 10.6% year-to-year in the six-month period ended September 2009.7 Big declines are almost certain to continue in 2010. To put this in perspective, newspapers have lost 16.9% circulation in three years and 25.6% since 2000.8

The online sites of newspapers continued to add audience through 2009, although measurement of that audience remains wildly imprecise.  Typically, such sites have developed well editorially, becoming the locus of breaking news and offering an array of Web-native features like blogs, discussion chains, interactive presentations and video.

But during 2009, online advertising revenues, which had grown at a robust rate as high as 35% a year earlier in the decade, actually declined year-to-year by about 10%.9

The industry made brave noises about charging for online content and some experiments will be forthcoming in 2010.  Generally, though, newspapers have hesitated to pull the trigger on a pay wall, fearing a big loss of audience that would drive online ad revenues farther down.

Besides a handful of closings, there were significant bankruptcies in 2009. At the top of that list was Tribune Company, owner of the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, among others, staggering under the huge burden of $13 billion in debt real estate baron Sam Zell took on to acquire it.  Others included Freedom Communications (owner of the Orange County Register), Star-Tribune of Minneapolis, Philadelphia Newspapers, Journal Register, MediaNews and Morris Publishing.

In March 2009, only Washington Post stock was trading among newspaper companies for more than $5 a share and several of the companies were entering penny stock territory.10

By the end of the year, shares still traded at far below their 2006 values but had ticked back up sharply from the depth-of-recession lows.

Improved fortunes for the industry should not be confused with an all’s well.  The trends remain negative.  Particularly troublesome — so long as advertising revenues decline, companies will need to make further cuts and potentially do more damage to their print and digital franchise.

Here is a summary, category by category:

Circulation and Readership

Circulation has been falling most of this decade, but the losses reported for the period ending in September 2009 were unprecedented:  10.6% daily and 7.5% Sunday compared to the same period a year earlier.  Some of that loss reflects readers opting to get news on the Web instead or dropping their subscriptions.  But there were other factors at work, too – continued trimming of circulation to distant geographic areas, limited money to spend on promoting new circulation and the recession’s impact on people who had lost their jobs or were worried they would.

Industry boosters correctly point out that newspaper Web site audiences continue to grow and that the total reach of a news organization’s print and digital offerings is probably greater than ever.  That hardly masks the business problem in print circulation declines – fewer ad impressions at the premium rates print commands, fewer copies distributed with packets of advertising inserts.

Advertising and Earnings

Advertising began improving late in 2009, in the sense that the percentage decline in year-to-year comparison was slowing.  Most public companies were reporting ad losses of 15% to 20% in the fourth quarter compared to fourth quarter 2008. An actual upturn in ad revenues is unlikely until mid-2010.

The woes are familiar:  loss of the once-lucrative classified franchise to electronic competitors like Craigslist and low rates for online display. And, of course, there was the recession. A remedy is less obvious, although continued improvement in targeting online ads to demonstrated user interests (as the industry has done through the Yahoo Newspaper Consortium) together with a share of the action in new ad formats like mobile or local search could help.

As expected, earnings continued to plunge in 2009, with many companies just breaking even once they made interest payments on their debt and paid down some of the principal.  The good news, if there was some, was that by dint of very deep cuts in operating budgets, most companies were squeaking out an operating profit by year’s end.

But 2010 should pose a pair of challenges. Most predict revenue will continue to fall, perhaps in the 10% range.  The cutbacks from the last two years thus probably will not be enough to keep papers profitable as that happens. A major task will be to minimize damage to the news report and customer service.  And then, once revenues do pick up — if they do — companies will need to strike a balance between improving profits and investing in rebuilding depleted news reports, together with starting up new ventures to diversify their revenue streams.

Newsroom Cutbacks

The dismal trends of 2007 and 2008 continued through 2009 and 2010.  The American

Society of News Editors census estimated 2,400 full-time professional newsroom jobs lost in 2007 and 5,900 in 2008.  Absent final numbers we expect at least as many losses in 2009.

Minorities include Native Americans, African Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans.

Papers are allocating much less space for the news report.  Separate business and features sections have been eliminated at many metros.  Lighter advertising days like Monday and Tuesday are especially skimpy in contrast to the Sunday edition, where ad revenues are relatively stronger and readers have more time to read long articles. One consequence of all that cutting is a pronounced drop in time-consuming investigative projects and serious day-to-day local accountability reporting

Ownership

Shares of publicly traded companies couldn’t fall much lower than the rock bottom prices of spring 2009. Indeed, they did rally, and stocks by the end of the year were up anywhere from 40% to 1,000% from their lows (though they are still typically down 80% to 90% from mid-decade peaks).11

With depressed earnings and shaky prospects, few newspapers were sold in 2009.  The still-profitable Austin American-Statesman in a big-state capital and growth market attracted bidder interest, but owner Cox pulled it off the market in August rather than accept what its publisher called “a fire-sale price.”12

After soliciting bids, the New York Times Company ended up in the fourth quarter selling neither the Boston Globe nor the Telegram-Gazette of Worchester, which had been for sale.

Through bankruptcy proceedings, several papers did pass into the hands of private equity firms specializing in distressed debt.  The Star Tribune of Minneapolis and Journal Register papers emerged from bankruptcy under creditor control.  Creditors were also seeking control of Philadelphia Newspapers and the Tribune Company. Platinum Equity acquired the San Diego Union Tribune at a bargain liquidation price. It appears that 2010 will be the first test of how these nontraditional owners run papers once they take over.

So how bad is the condition of the industry?

It is certainly fair to say without the major cost structure cuts of the past couple of years, the majority of metros would have been facing a death sentence. That is not a likely outcome, however.

The beginnings of overall economic recovery will bring at least some of the disappearing ad revenues back.  It remains an open question whether newspapers and their digital operations will grab a significant share of the recovery ad dollars or whether companies will shift big portions of their budgets to new digital marketing formats without news content.

With deep expense cuts in place, even modestly improved revenues will drop easily to the bottom line.

For the time being, advertising inserts remains a strong business (while tilting ad revenue further to the Sunday edition).  Industry advocates continue to argue that the reach of print newspapers, even if circulation has fallen, is attractive and valuable as media fragmentation increases. Similarly, branding campaigns are not going away, and that may be an area where newspapers, along with other traditional media like television and billboards, hold their own against trendier digital and search alternatives.

But those arguments, familiar for more than a decade, cannot gloss over weak print readership by younger people.  And papers are flirting with a tipping point where the cutbacks are so great that even loyal audiences give up.

The plight of the industry and the erosion of journalism’s civic contribution have caught the attention of Congress and agencies like the Federal Trade Commission and Federal Communications Commission.  There is little consensus yet within government – or even within the industry – about what action would help or even whether government can be involved without damaging traditions of independence.

The problems are not uniform across the industry. Big-city papers continue to have the worst of it in these difficult times.  Small dailies and community weeklies, with the exception of some that are badly positioned or badly managed, still do better.  The latter come closer to the late-20th century position of newspapers as the dominant source for local information and the place for local merchants to advertise.

The three national dailies, never so dependent on classifieds, had a rough advertising year in 2010, but are positioned relatively well as the economy rebounds.  The three papers – the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today — all have strong Web sites (as does the Washington Post) with a growing national and international audience and comparatively strong ad base.

In a possible sign of shifting industry dynamics, the New York Times launched regional supplements to its San Francisco and Chicago editions, drawing on the work of well-financed donor-sponsored startups.  Similarly, ESPN launched regional sites in Chicago, Boston, Dallas and Los Angeles, challenging papers there for dominance in sports reporting. The Wall Street Journal is rolling out regional supplements as well and increasing its local coverage of New York City.

But if this is, as it appears, a case of well-off national media lions (and some new media challengers) feasting on sickly antelopes, watch for many metros to fight back in 2010.  Already, for example, the Seattle Times has responded to the rich collection of neighborhood Web sites in that city by partnering with and aggregating 19 of them.13

The Dallas Morning News announced late in 2009 that it was adding back a handful of reporters and editors to strengthen the paper, for which it will charge a proportionately higher price.  Dallas is trying to please advertisers that may be worried about the paper’s falling circulation with a separate, free quick-read paper delivered in higher-income Zip codes.

Similarly, Gannett has established Sunday Select, essentially to deliver an insert packet to targeted nonsubscribers.

All of these developments suggested a thaw. Post-recession, newspaper companies are beginning to make small strategic investments in their future.  We still see the first half of 2010, though, as mostly a continuation of the hunkering down of 2009.

After that we may soon see the return of an old choice.  Do papers extract most of the returning ad revenue in higher profits?  Or will they recognize the damage done by the financial hurricane that swept through the industry and apply some substantial investment to developing new lines of business and rebuilding skimpy news reports in print and online?

Pasted from <http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2010/newspapers_summary_essay.php>

Jobs in journalism growing

Did you go to journalism school to become an online community manager? Probably not, but that is one of the hottest jobs on the market these days and you can’t launch a successful digital news business without it.

The era of specialization is dead, but a new class of jobs and roles at new era news businesses offer exciting opportunities for journalists and communicators who are interested in new thinking and new approaches.

In terms of jobs, journalistic occupations are outperforming the overall economy, according to Michael Mandel, former chief economist at BusinessWeek and founder of Visible Economy LLC. That certainly seems counterintuitive to anyone who has heard about, or directly experienced, layoffs at newspapers and TV stations in the past five years. A shift in journalistic employment to nontraditional companies such as Yahoo and AOL, plus an increase in self-employed journalists has created surprising growth.

Drawing from numbers based on the Current Population Survey, a monthly survey of roughly 60,000 households conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau, Mandel found the overall number of employed journalists increased by 19% from 2007-2010.

Over a comparable time period, Mandel notes, employment in newspaper publishing has fallen 26%; periodical employment is down 16%; and radio and television broadcasting is down 11%.

Journalists are getting jobs. Just not in the traditional industries or at the companies you would expect.

And those traditional news companies that are hiring? They aren’t looking for the same old thing any longer. A spirit of innovation is mandatory, previous experience is not. If you are willing to learn new ways of communicating to – and with – an audience, including inventing some of your own, you’re ready for a job in a new era news business.

Luddites need not apply. New skills can be learned, but those individuals who have shown a previous proclivity toward trying new types of digital communication will separate themselves from the pack.

Indeed, here’s a piece of a job posting from July 30, 2010 on the Tribune website:

The TV revolution is upon us – and the new Tribune Company is leading the resistance. We’re recruiting a solid team of anti-establishment producer/editors, “preditors”, to collaborate on a groundbreaking morning news/infotainment format unlike anything ever attempted on local TV. Don’t sell us on your solid newsroom experience. We don’t care. Or your exclusive, breaking news coverage. We’ll pass. Or your excellence at writing readable copy for plastic anchorpeople. Not interested.

Sell us on this:

-Your personal relationship with the internet, blogs, video-sharing, iPads, Droids, Blackberries, Blueteeth, Facebook & Twitter, and all things Modern Culture

-You’re in sync with the pulse of the streets, not the PC, Capital “J” journalism world

It’s a new era, whether you’re looking for work in journalism at a traditional company or ready to explore the emerging world of journalism outside newspapers and TV stations. The career path is no longer well-defined, however. In addition to new skills, you will need a new adaptability to find your way. Just know that, if you have an open mind and an innovative spirit, the possibilities are out there.

Pasted from <http://www.journalism20.com/blog/>

Tim Rutten:

Regarding Media

Don’t print the obit just yet

“So, you’ve been over into Russia,” Bernard Baruch said to the muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens, recently returned from a fact-finding trip to the new Soviet Union.

“I have been over into the future,” Steffens replied, “and it works.”

Eighty-four years have passed since that famous exchange, but it perfectly encapsulates the smug certainty that still intoxicates Americans who think they’re on to the next big thing. In part, it’s a matter of our reflexive faith in the benefits of progress; in part, a consequence of our unquenchable optimism. There’s just something about the future that makes some among us giddy.

In fact, giddy doesn’t quite begin to describe the reaction in some quarters to this week’s news that the long-term decline in the number of American newspaper readers accelerated during the last reporting period. The fall was particularly sharp among Los Angeles Times readers, whose numbers dropped 6.5% Monday through Saturday and 7.9% on Sunday. No sane person who hopes to go on making a living out of newspaper journalism is going to laugh off numbers like that. They’re a clear challenge to newspaper promotion and circulation departments and — in more subtle and complex ways — to editors and reporters, as well.

But are they really, as the new media triumphalists would have it, the latest and longest nail in the coffin of mainstream news media in general and newspapers in particular? To borrow New York University journalism professor and blogger Jay Rosen’s provocative formulation, has the time come for “laying the newspaper gently down to die?”

No, but here’s where we lose a certain number of the new media propagandists because we’re about to bring up the past. (Wait guys, don’t go … don’t think of it as history, but as a whole series of previously realized futures. See, we can get along.)

The notion that the advent of new communication technologies — in this case digitalization and the Web — inevitably spells oblivion for other media has no basis in experience. Just look around:

A lot has happened since Gutenberg set the Bible into type, but printed books still are purchased in the millions. Film was supposed to kill the novel. Tell that to Philip Roth. Television was supposed to eliminate movie theaters. Check out your local multiplex tonight. Radio and, later, TV were supposed to make newspapers and magazines obsolete. In fact, while broadcast journalism did contribute to the death of afternoon newspapers, the print media’s ambition and quality rose exponentially after the advent of network news, though it’s true that the overall number of outlets declined. Around the world, hundreds of millions of dollars still are being spent on fax machines — a “regressive” technology if ever there was one, since there’s no real need to exchange paper documents in a digitalized world. There even are companies making handsome profits selling fountain pens to people with wireless keyboards.

Why, then, this rush to bury newspapers?

At the moment, you’ve basically got three groups who are busily organizing a wake without a corpse.

First are the ideologically minded commentators — mostly right wing, a handful on the left — who have found a congenial home in the blogosphere. Their critique is basically an exercise in wishful thinking. They want newspapers to die because their editors just won’t print the news they want in the language they demand. These folks see the world through utterly polarized lenses and don’t believe any other view is possible.

Second are the academics for whom migration from one novelty to another has become a kind of career path. For them, the death of newspapers is the next new thing, something to be endlessly parsed and conferred over — until the next new thing comes along. This is the world in which new criticism gives way to semiotics, which gives way to deconstruction, which … well, you get the point. Does anyone remember communitarism and civic journalism? No? Well, they were the last flavor of the month, and let’s not go there.

Finally, there are demoralized newspaper proprietors themselves, though we employ the term loosely, since nowadays a majority of them are corporate apparatchiks. They are essentially creatures of the herd, oddly wary and complacent in the manner of sheep. They are easily alarmed and tend to gang together and infect one another with anxiety. They bear a heavy responsibility for newspaper journalism’s current difficulties. For more than a decade many of them — like their counterparts in broadcast news — have acquiesced in endless rounds of cost-cutting. In fact, to an extent probably impossible to determine, the most recent declines in newspaper readership may be, in some large part, a consequence of excessive cuts in promotion and circulation budgets across the industry over the last five years.

Like any other business — and perhaps more than in most — a healthy news media company requires steady and substantial reinvestment. Somewhere along the line, corporate media executives have lost sight of that fact and allowed themselves to be demoralized by their own lack of creativity. It’s impossible to recall how many times over these last few years we’ve heard one of them cite the infamous Harvard Business School case study on why the railroads “failed,” while other executives nodded sagely.

The bottom line, according to this argument: They failed because they thought they were in the railroad business and forgot they were in the transportation business.

Yeah, yeah. But the fact is that railroads didn’t vanish. They changed, and today they’re an indispensable part of the American economy and rolling up very nice profits for their owners.

The notion that print newspapers won’t find ways to adapt, absorb and adjust to the Internet and other new media is as narrow and ahistorical as the insistence by some print media fundamentalists that bloggers aren’t journalists and are not entitled to 1st Amendment protections.

In fact, bloggers are opinion journalists in the same sense that op-ed commentators are — and every bit as entitled to protection. A good case can be made, moreover, that the political speech in which the many of them are engaged is precisely what the Founders intended to protect.

Their numbers and general lack of civility may make that inconvenient, but who said liberty was supposed to be neat or easy? The best guess — which is what those of us wary of predictions do — may be that the futures of both newspapers and blogging are linked.

By the time Steffens came to recall his exchange with Baruch for his 1931 “Autobiography,” he had become disenchanted with communism. Our prediction is that when the rest of us go over into the future, we’ll find newspapers in which to read the obituaries of all those now busily composing print’s epitaph.

Abandoning the News

by Merrill Brown

What’s the future of the news business? This report to Carnegie Corporation of New York offers some provocative ideas.

There’s a dramatic revolution taking place in the news business today and it isn’t about TV anchor changes, scandals at storied newspapers or embedded reporters. The future course of the news, including the basic assumptions about how we consume news and information and make decisions in a democratic society are being altered by technology-savvy young people no longer wedded to traditional news outlets or even accessing news in traditional ways.

In short, the future of the U.S. news industry is seriously threatened by the seemingly irrevocable move by young people away from traditional sources of news.

Through Internet portal sites, handheld devices, blogs and instant messaging, we are accessing and processing information in ways that challenge the historic function of the news business and raise fundamental questions about the future of the news field. Meanwhile, new forms of newsgathering and distribution, grassroots or citizen journalism and blogging sites are changing the very nature of who produces news. With these elemental shifts in mind, Carnegie Corporation of New York has launched a major initiative on the future of news and commissioned this report, based on a survey of 18-to-34-year-olds carried out by Frank N. Magid Associates in May 2004. (A set of PowerPoint slides comprising a distillation of the survey data is available on the Corporation’s web site, www.carnegie.org/pdf/AbandoningTheNews.ppt.) The goal of this effort is to assess where 18-to-34-year-olds get their news today and how they think they’ll access news in the future.

For news professionals coming out of the traditions of conventional national and local journalism, fields long influenced by national news organizations and dominant local broadcasting and print media, the revolution in how individuals relate to the news is often viewed as threatening. For digital media professionals, members of the blogging community and other participants in the new media wave, these trends are, conversely, considered liberating and indications that an “old media” oligopoly is being supplemented, if not necessarily replaced, by new forms of journalism created by freelancers and interested members of the public without conventional training.

The Internet Migration
At the heart of the assessment of the news-related habits of adults age 18-to-34 are fundamental changes driven by technology and market forces. Data indicate that this segment of the population intends to continue to increase their use of the Internet as a primary news source in the coming years and that it is a medium embraced in meaningful ways. Newspapers and national television broadcast news fare poorly with this critical demographic group.

Surprisingly to some, among 18-to-34-year-olds, local TV is ranked as the most used source of news, with over 70 percent of the age group using it at least once a week and over half of those surveyed using local TV news at least three times a week. The local TV ranking is driven in an overall sense by women and low- and middle-income groups. Meanwhile, the second-most-used weekly news source, the Internet, is number one among men, high-income groups, and broadband users.

With over half of Internet users now connecting via high-speed broadband services, daily use of the Internet among all groups is likely to climb, because broadband access, the way an increasing number of households go online, makes daily usage more likely. Already, Internet portals—widely used, general interest web sites such as Yahoo.com and MSN.com that include news streams all day, every day—have emerged in the survey as the most frequently cited daily news source, with 44 percent of the group using portals at least once a day for news. Measured by daily use, local TV comes in second at 37 percent, followed by network or cable TV web sites at 19 percent, newspapers at 19 percent, cable networks at 18 percent and national broadcast networks at 16 percent.

And by other measures, the Internet is already clearly ahead of other media among the young. According to the Magid survey, young news consumers say that the Internet, by a 41-to-15 percent margin over second ranked local TV, is “the most useful way to learn.” And 49 percent say the Internet provides news “only when I want it” (a critical factor to this age group) versus 15 percent for second-ranked local TV. This audience, the future news consumers and leaders of a complex, modern society, are abandoning the news as we’ve known it, and it’s increasingly clear that a great number of them will never return to daily newspapers and the national broadcast news programs.

Other notable findings revealed by the survey: although ranked as the third most important news source, newspapers have no clear strengths and are the least preferred choice for local, national and international news. On the TV front, cable news is the fourth most valuable news source just ahead of national network programs. Those broadcast newscasts are, however, considered the number-one source for national news. Cable is considered up-to-date and accessible, but not as informative as the Internet.

A Revolution In News And In Public Discourse
The dramatic shift in how young people access the news raises a question about how democracy and the flow of information will interact in the years ahead. Not only is a large segment of the population moving away from traditional news institutions, but there has also been an explosion of alternative news sources. Some have been assembled by traditional news organizations delivering information in print, on television and on the radio as well as via the Internet and mobile devices. Others include the thousands of blogs created by journalists, activists and citizens at large.

Clearly, young people don’t want to rely on the morning paper on their doorstep or the dinnertime newscast for up-to-date information; in fact, they—as well as others—want their news on demand, when it works for them. And, say many experts, in this new world of journalism, young people want a personal level of engagement and want those presenting the news to them to be transparent in their assumptions, biases and history.

While it is premature to definitively judge the impact of this revolution on public affairs, political discourse or on journalism itself, the writing is on the wall: the course of how the news will be delivered in the future has already been altered and more changes are undoubtedly on the way. How can we expect anything else, when the average age of a print newspaper reader is 53 and the average age of both broadcast and cable news viewers is about the same? Baby boomers read newspapers one-third less than their parents and the Gen Xers read newspapers another one-third less than the Boomers.

Whether the industry is reacting fast enough to these dramatic changes is another question altogether. “By and large, the major news companies are still turning a blind eye to what is happening because it’s challenging and they need to consider radical change,” says researcher Rusty Coats, Director of New Media at Minnesota Opinion Research, Inc. (MORI). “[Change is] way too incremental at this point,” he continues. “Major newspaper companies are embracing the Internet but are still using it as a supplement or as a means to sell print subscriptions and not seeing its unique value.” Coats points out that there’s a “big buzz” within the newspaper industry about developing “loyalty programs,” marketing efforts designed to deepen the customer’s commitment to a given product. So a subscriber to the Chicago Tribune, for example, might receive airline discounts as part of a program. “I’m all for rewarding valuable customers but I wish there was more thought devoted to developing new products. Does a newspaper publishing a youth-oriented web site once a month or once a week really think this will cause fundamental change? The real issue is how are we going to [compete with] Yahoo?” In that regard, Coats suggests that maybe big papers “need to own cellular services” or other large distribution vehicles to reach new audiences. What is needed, Coats and others argue, is a substantial commitment to new product development, investments that news companies—even in their triumphant days of dominance and vast profitability—were reluctant to make.

But these issues can no longer be swept aside by the news oligopolies that have dominated the latter part of the 20th century, as news executives and researchers generally agree. Indeed, those who gather, report and administer the delivery of news are increasingly focusing on the reality that technology, the enormous variety of media choices, demographics and to a certain extent, the struggles of traditional news organizations and the journalism community to adjust to change, have left mass audience, mass media newsgathering and dissemination in peril. And that’s unlikely to change. As Lewis Dvorkin, AOL’s top editorial executive and a long-time news executive warns, “I don’t think that with the lifestyles of people today, the demands on people’s time, today’s family life and the extended hours of work, people will come back to the old ways of consuming the news.”

Until recently, however, managers in the newspaper industry, for example, generally avoided confronting the decades of data about declining use of newspapers among the younger members of society. Instead, they took what is turning out to be false comfort in historic data that generally affirmed the view that older citizens always wind up with the familiar local newspaper because of their interest in world affairs, their pocketbooks, concern with local schools and the issues of modern life. But there’s no denying that the numbers are changing. The deterioration of the newspaper marketplace has been steady among young people and would appear to be accelerating. From 1972 to 1998, the percentage of people age 30-to-39 who read a paper every day dropped from 73 to 30 percent. And in just the years between 1997 and 2000, the percentage of 18-to-24-year-olds who say they read yesterday’s newspaper dropped by 14 percent, according to the Newspaper Association of America. The only conclusion to be reached after noting these trends is that no future generation of new consumers will fit earlier profiles since their expectations and their habits have changed forever—and technology is a big part of the reason why.

“Young people are more curious than ever but define news on their own terms,” says Jeff Jarvis, who is president of Advance.net, a unit of Advance Publications, and who publishes a widely read blog, Buzzmachine.com. “They get news where they want it, when they want it. Media is about control now. We used to wait for the news to come to us. Now news waits for us to come to it. That’s their expectation. We get news on cable and on the Internet any time, any place.”

What this means is that American journalism institutions face risks of extraordinary magnitude. To be sure, the news industry is an evolving business, but even within that context, recent changes in the news business must be viewed as a wake-up call for all involved. Consider the fact that broadcast television’s evening news programs, for example, are no longer the family hearth that brings people throughout the country together at meal time. Or that television networks, which used to employ dozens of high-profile correspondents around the world, now deploy just a few. (Certainly, in the years leading up to September 11, 2001, international reporting on television was in rapid decline, often almost invisible on national television.) Afternoon newspapers have disappeared from American life and cities that for decades had multiple newspaper choices now often have but one. The New York Times, USA Today and The Wall Street Journal are available on street corners throughout the country. The daily audiences of national news web sites dwarf those of their print counterparts.

Even the accepted, historic premise of how a free press and the skills of journalism bind together democratic institutions similarly merits a certain reassessment and reality check. There is little evidence that today’s politicians accept the notion that it’s mandatory to connect to the population via a “national press corps,” often choosing to go around the press and communicate through their own Internet sites, through friendly talk shows and blog forums.

A Time For Radical Thinking
In a world where national leaders are turning away from the news media, citizens have an increasing lack of confidence in the press and young people are moving perhaps permanently away from traditional newsgathering organizations, a radical rethinking of how news is delivered seems necessary—even overdue. Press watchers and public figures have varying, though often critical views on the performance of the national press, and many critics claim that new forms of citizen or Internet media can help fix general media inadequacies and gaping holes in coverage of important issues. Nevertheless, many feel that the country still needs strengthened newsgathering capabilities to help Americans develop a true understanding of an increasingly complex world, and argue that only strong, national media organizations cover wars, elections, news from around the world and in metropolitan communities in ways that help inform large numbers of citizens.

Efforts to stave off what seem like catastrophic times ahead for the news business and its deteriorating relationship with young news consumers are already underway. Some examples:

Despite these innovations, some experts still warn that the news business—and with it, perhaps, the nation itself—faces a troubled future. As David Mindich, author of Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don’t Follow the News (Oxford University Press, 2004) concluded in a recent interview on an industry web site that today’s young citizens “are still just as thoughtful, intelligent—and I would argue, literate—as ever before. What has changed is that young people no longer see a need to keep up with the news.” Says Mindich in his recent book: “America is facing the greatest exodus of informed citizenship in its history.”

The Challenge: Retaining Audiences While Building New Ones
At its essence, the conclusions of the Magid survey support much of what many researchers and careful students of the media have been saying and raises a set of dramatic red flags about newsgathering in the 21st century. One such scholar, Betsy Frank, Executive Vice President, Research and Planning, Viacom’s Cable Networks, Film and Publishing, is a preeminent researcher and thinker about young people and media use and calls them “media actives.” The media revolution, she says, “affects so many aspects of their lives and news just happens to be one of them. Nothing we see in their comfort with technology will go away as they get older. They have no loyalty to media institutions like their parents did.”

Similarly, CBS News President Andrew Heyward says that young people are “information impressionists. News is gathered by the impressions they receive from many sources around them.” How news executives today deal with the ways news is consumed, in the form of an image here, an instant message there, a cell phone text message headline, a web portal story or a newspaper shoved into a passing hand while racing to the bus, will say a great deal about the future of news as we know it.

For Heyward and other media executives interviewed for this report, the challenge is real. Whether it is thinking about the recrafting of the CBS Evening News in the post-Dan Rather-era or how to distribute CBS news content on new and evolving platforms Heyward, for example, says he’s constantly thinking about ways to engage younger viewers. “We are going to have to be accessible without just being bite-sized,” he says. “We are way behind in translating the strengths of television to the new media. We are nowhere on storytelling for the new media and for these younger audiences. We have to figure out how to use the new technologies in ways that address our strengths—immediacy and personality. There is a broader, new definition of news that we will need to develop for this next generation.”

History suggests that news products tailored to meet the emerging needs of different times and different generations is not a far-fetched idea. Business coverage, for example, an afterthought in many newspapers until the 1980s and 90s, now gets vastly more attention from most news organizations than in previous eras. But perhaps an even more pressing concern, beyond simply beefing up coverage in one category or another or adding younger faces to a network newscast, is whether approaches to stories and prevailing traditions can really change. Can storytelling evolve to add more interactivity, citizen participation, inclusion of younger newsmakers and the use of music, innovative pacing and more engaging graphic and presentation elements? These changes—which represent many once widely observed taboos against embellishing straight news in any way—are at the core of what many in the business wrestle with today.

Progress toward those new definitions of news and public affairs may have been accelerated by the unpredictability and unexpected developments that were the media and new technology story underpinning last November’s general election. The 2004 campaign provided any number of examples—both anecdotal and from the research already available—about the impact of the revolution at hand and how it engaged young news consumers. Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean built his campaign on connecting young Internet-savvy activists and both the ultimate Democratic nominee, Senator John Kerry, and the Republican victor, President George W. Bush, used the Internet as a critical part of their public relations and fundraising efforts, strategies directed largely at young people. Campaign commentary and coverage from bloggers moved from being perceived as idiosyncratic and away from the mainstream to being a critical part of the debate about the CBS News reporting on President Bush’s military record and ultimately, the blogging phenomenon reached the level of attention that comes with a cover story in The New York Times Magazine. From a more concrete point of view:

• The Pew Internet and American Life Project determined that among 18-to-34-year-olds with high-speed Internet access, 40 percent said the Internet was their main campaign news source, twice the percentage that cited newspapers. The Pew Center also reported that 21 percent of all Americans identified the Internet as their main campaign news source, twice the percentage as in the 2000 election.

• A study of 18-to-29-year-olds carried out as part of “Declare Yourself, ” a national nonpartisan effort to register voters for last year’s election, reported that 25 percent of young voters named the Internet as the first or second most important source for news compared to just 15 percent for newspapers. In that same study, Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show on the Comedy Central network was identified as the most trusted of the TV anchors among the group that chose the Internet as their top news source, while among the entire group, Stewart tied with then-NBC anchor Tom Brokaw and came in ahead of ABC’s Peter Jennings and former CBS anchor Dan Rather when asked about who they “trust the most” to provide “information about politics and politicians.”

It is widely believed that this election year data represents, in some ways, a sea change in both consumption patterns and in how news is consumed. Those Jon Stewart viewers or consumers of popular blogs like Talking Points Memo (talkingpointsmemo.com) on the left side of the political spectrum and Power Line (www.powerlineblog.com) on the right have, it would seem, changed the way they approach and view the news. Active consumers are unlikely any longer to rely on single sources for coverage of issues that matter to them. And they’ll never be consuming news without clear chunks of opinion as part of the mix.

Few news executives are active, widely read bloggers. But for the one who can make that claim, journalist and blogger Jeff Jarvis, the election-year attention on Jon Stewart, the blogging phenomena and the surging growth of Internet use for both business and personal activities points out that attitude and voice matter more to today’s young news consumers than earlier notions of journalistic objectivity and fact gathering. And Jarvis observes that today’s young people want to understand—on an entirely different level from previous generations—the politics and attitudes of those who write and deliver the news.

That kind of transparency is what pundits like Jarvis are often most passionate about and indicates why, as perceived from the right and the left, Fox News Channel, Jon Stewart and bloggers have a lot in common. All three both dish and dig and combine opinion and fact gathering in ways that have caught on with significant numbers of consumers. Opinionated reporting, seen most clearly from bloggers, raised questions about the documents in the Dan Rather-George Bush scandal about use of unverified documents in CBS News reporting about President Bush’s military record, and had stunning impact. Jon Stewart, meanwhile, hosts politicians of all persuasions while at the same time calling his program “phony news.” Jarvis says that rather than be alarmed about Stewart’s popularity and credibility as a “news source,” news professionals ought to view Stewart’s ascent as “as an endorsement of a new honesty in the news, of the importance of bringing news down off its pedestal and presenting it at eye-level.” He adds: “I think we [are seeing] a phenomenon in news that cuts across age groups but includes young people: we are coming to prefer our news with opinion, or at least an admission of opinion.”

What’s more, Jarvis and others talk a great deal about giving audiences and especially young people a level of control about when they access news or choose to participate in public affairs. For the Internet world of the Howard Dean campaign with its reliance on online “meetings,” web-based communications and fundraising and the blog world, in which anybody with a keyboard is a publisher in a new community referred to as the “blogosphere,” everybody who wants to be involved not only can be, but can also make choices about when and at what level to become or stay involved. It’s as easy, now, as turning on a computer.

New Products For A Different Consumer
In a growing number of urban areas, if you’ve gotten off a train or bus lately, it’s likely you’ve been offered a free newspaper—or at least, a new version of a newspaper. Around 50 newspapers (and Luxembourg-based Metro International with editions in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia) have launched pared-down versions of their product, generally for free distribution at commuter locations. The goal: introduce busy young professionals and others to publications that highlight headlines, weather, sports scores and news you can use on the run. It’s an Internet-inspired phenomenon, in part, because it serves a similar purpose: providing quick snapshots of what’s happening in the world of culture, news and entertainment, and placing it directly in the hands of consumers.

Says Chris Ma, publisher of The Washington Post’s giveaway paper, Express, “We’re reaching commuters who are infrequent or non-newspaper readers and building an advertising business at the same time.” About 175,000 copies of Express are given away daily. In Miami, Knight Ridder’s Miami Herald now publishes Street Weekly, or Street for short, which it cheerfully refers to as an “alternative arts and entertainment free publication.” Street has a free circulation of 70,000 throughout the Miami-Dade region and promotes itself as “Edgy, colorful and irreverent.”

The development of these free papers represents the largest single media industry response yet to the readership collapse. What’s less clear, though, is what the production of these “newspaper-lite” products means for journalism. Will these papers merely summarize the work of the parent publication or create their own voice and journalistic traditions? Will they make original reporting obsolete by a concentration on summaries, wire stories, graphics, stock data, sports scores and weather?

At the parent companies of these papers and at the large news organizations, talented producers and editors are wrestling with these same issues but often approaching them from a different direction, working on methods of bringing in younger audiences without disturbing powerful news products which, in most cases, continue to enrich their owners with consequential profit margins. Media executives like Sandra Rowe, editor of The Oregonian and a former chair of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, have their hands full trying to evolve their publications with the profitability paradigm as the vexing, short-term conundrum.

Rowe thinks there are many things her paper can do and is doing in terms of story selection, story telling, packaging and creative use of the Internet to engage young people, but wishes the resources were available to do more, especially to develop new products. “I look at this age group as really smart young adults,” she says. “They don’t have any patience for us wasting time and approaching things in predictable ways. So part of what newspapers can do is tell them something they don’t know about something interesting.” Just covering City Hall isn’t enough, she says. “What they’re looking for is a closer lens…[In order to be that for them] we have to be plugged in at City Hall so we can tell them how money is used and how they are affected. With this crowd, newspapers and magazines have to be visually strong and focused on what the story is—a story with a beginning, middle and end. If papers could do that, we could satisfy that age group.” She also believes that editors who look at newspaper beats as independent sources of newsroom information are missing the boat, particularly when it comes to assessing the interests of younger readers. “Arts, business, commerce and education…these areas are no longer discrete and what’s most interesting are the places where they intersect.”

Though frustrated at the industry’s slow pace, Rowe sees a day ahead when newspaper editors will have more products and ways to leverage their expertise. In this model, she says, her paper would be reaching different sensibilities with, for example, an alternative weekly, community papers, the leading regional portal and a network of sites. By managing multiple products and building a stronger economic base, Rowe thinks that such an organization would have the resources to put “the interest back in public interest reporting. If you can be the primary information source in the community,” she adds, “and do so because it’s your responsibility, the commercial argument would work and would be designed to support that.”

The view that the traditional news organization, whether it’s a daily newspaper or television network news operation, is effectively a “mother ship” feeding material to multiple products on multiple platforms isn’t necessarily a brand-new one. But the scale of what Rowe is proposing is a start at rethinking fading traditions.

That’s why it’s already an overwhelmingly challenging time in the worlds of cable television and broadcast news, as well as in print media. Young people are moving away not just from television news to the Internet, but also away from television in general, a fact that makes it difficult for TV marketing organizations to even reach the next generation of news consumers since many have already abandoned TV for their computers. Still, enterprising television executives do have a variety of new tools and distribution mechanisms at their disposal. Within the new NBC Universal family, for example, there’s an abundance of opportunities with CNBC, MSNBC, USA Network, the Sci Fi Channel and Bravo. Meanwhile, CBS News management is focused on CBSnews.com, and the assets of Viacom, the parent of CBS. Viacom owns Nickelodeon, Black Entertainment Television, MTV, and mtvU, formerly the College Television Network. On mtvU.com, today you can find CBS News headlines.

Like his competitors at ABC, CBS News President Andrew Heyward says he is committed to developing products for the broadband marketplace, a means to find potential television news consumers at their desktops at home or at work. Some news organizations have already made a promising start. Last summer, ABC News launched ABC News Now, a subscription-based news network designed to capture the desktop audience at work, at school or on the move. It will be available on broadband services, digital cable and wireless services. Nothing like it has ever been tried before in the U.S. and it clearly fills a void in the ABC News distribution plan.

Success in these areas is critical for the networks. “We would like to attract younger viewers,” says Bill Wheatley, Vice President, News at NBC News. “We know advertisers will pay us more to reach them and NBC has long been accepted as a network with appeal to younger people. But in news, the challenge is great. The trick is that we are a mass medium and if we target young people too regularly and too narrowly, we will lose other parts of the audience. We may, though, come to a point where we will have to create programs just for younger viewers.”

That is very likely what it’s going to take to change current trends for mainstream news organizations. They are going to have to program for the demographic if they are to retain consequential news franchises. For CBS News, that means using those networks in their corporate family. For others with less obvious ways to reach younger viewers, an investment strategy will be required. And at some point along the way, game-changing strategies, what Rusty Coats would call “radical” or business strategists term “disruptive” tactics, are required. (Disruptive meaning along the lines of a model that has technology and telecommunications companies merging or aligning with news companies.) As Ted Turner changed the game at a much different moment in time with the invention of CNN, and as Apple changed another game by providing accessible music downloads, dramatic moves—accompanied by the simultaneous but deft, prudent tinkering of skilled print editors, television producers and digital media journalists and technologists—are unquestionably required.

Summing Up: The Message Is Clear
What the survey data commissioned by the Corporation—as well as the message that’s coming in loud and clear from bloggers and their readers—are telling us is that there are new forms of participatory or citizen journalism that can engage those who had been outside today’s news environments. Last spring, The Bakersfield Californian launched The Northwest Voice (http://www.northwestvoice.com), a community weekly paper and Internet site. Most of the content is produced by members of the community and submitted via the Internet. Similarly, The Command Post (http://www.command-post.org/) is a site created by a worldwide network of bloggers set up to cover stories and package links to other sites that add documentation. Many news executives cringe at the idea of such projects. But these are bold concepts and their premise—that news can actually be generated by readers—may be precisely what many young, dissatisfied news consumers will respond to. Similarly, news organizations need to connect to consumers through e-mail and instant messaging services, need to join the virtual online conversations that are a central place where news is discussed and need to not only embrace these approaches but also use new technologies in order to reach out to younger audiences.

It is also apparent that news has to be produced specifically for and directed to the audiences of the future, and reach them in the ways they want. In developing news products for this audience, what’s required is to understand that yesterday’s news is literally that and recognize that daily news delivery mechanisms, ranging from television newscasts to magazine shows to newspapers and their giveaway stepchildren, need an approach to the news focused on techniques that go far beyond who said what yesterday or the day before. New products could be built around information services designed for the Internet, or for cellular and multimedia delivery. These could include, for example, innovative, even risky programming models delivered over broadband with unique voices and tied into related blogs on specific topics, ranging from national security to local restaurants.

News executives need to quickly mobilize around what are today their secondary platforms, at least measured in terms of where, currently, their largest revenue opportunities exist. In other words, even if the daily newspaper industry’s advertising revenue dwarfs its Internet business, the future of the American newspaper will be defined online from both a future readership point of view and perhaps in terms of future revenue streams as well. It is time for print industry investments in Internet products to match the online audience size and the extraordinary magnitude of the migration to digital news delivery.

While making investments is imperative, the news industry needs to do so while simultaneously inventing new, creative business approaches. Few news organizations think methodically and creatively about product development, and resources allocated to studying and inventing new news products are generally miniscule. Even at universities and think tanks, research on these critical topics is limited. Nevertheless, the time has come to forge new liaisons between the disparate worlds of research, education and news organizations in order to maximize intellectual capability and limited resources.

Meanwhile, the news industry should recognize the importance of what’s going on in places like Bakersfield and work hand-in-hand with bloggers and other independent journalists and citizens to experiment with the formation of new alliances and the development of new products. With safeguards, and appropriate standards as an early requirement, news organizations large and small should bring the public—including their local community—into their news gathering and news delivery planning processes in ways that were probably unimaginable just a few years ago. From the simple touches, like making every news professional’s e-mail address available, to the more complex, such as engaging with news sources and the citizenry at large in meaningful dialogue, there are clearly methods for providing the accessibility younger audiences are likely to embrace. In other words, news executives need to think about their products as participatory community institutions, not merely as distributors of their own creative output, and open themselves to input, feedback, ideas and journalism from outside their own organizations. In addition, news organizations must recognize the value of the one piece of technology that’s in virtually every hand around the world—the cell phone—so that the mobile revolution is, in fact, part of a news revolution.

Ironically, some large news organizations don’t even adequately leverage the know-how and expertise within their own companies. There are hundreds of very capable, technologically savvy Internet executives within large news organizations whose views about the future and whose ideas for new products and initiatives are dismissed or ignored altogether. Every major broadcast and cable news organization exists today within a corporate family that includes Hollywood studios, institutions where new technologies, new distribution channels, new production techniques and new storytelling techniques are developed. They talk infrequently and awkwardly.

Without this kind of dramatic rethinking, without a new openness to new approaches, the news industry is in peril. Certainly, the newspaper revenue model based in large part on classified and job advertising will never be the same, with so much revenue disappearing to the Internet. One recent study said the popular, free Internet site, craigslist (www.craigslist.com), had cost San Francisco Bay Area newspapers $50- $65 million in job listing revenue alone.

While the outright collapse of large news organizations is hardly imminent, as the new century progresses, it’s hard to escape the fact that their franchises have eroded and their futures are far from certain. A turnaround is certainly possible, but only for those news organizations willing to invest time, thought and resources into engaging their audiences, especially younger consumers. The trend lines are clear. So is the importance of a dynamic news business to our civic life, to our educational future, and to our democracy.

FOR YOUR REFERENCE: THE FUTURE OF NEWSPAPERS

Thursday, Mary Schmich and I will be dialoguing on the future of newspapers in the digital age.

Below are some of the recent essays and articles on this subject I found while researching this topic:

• ”Abandoning the News,” Merrill Brown, founding editor-in-chief of MSNBC, in the Carnegie Reporter, Spring, 2005:

The future of the U.S. news industry is seriously threatened by the seemingly irrevocable move by young people away from traditional sources of news….This audience, the future news consumers and leaders of a complex, modern society, are abandoning the news as we’ve known it, and it’s increasingly clear that a great number of them will never return to daily newspapers….the average age of a print newspaper reader is 53…. From 1972 to 1998, the percentage of people age 30-to-39 who read a paper every day dropped from 73 to 30 percent. And in just the years between 1997 and 2000, the percentage of 18-to-24-year-olds who say they read yesterday’s newspaper dropped by 14 percent….Nothing we see in (young people’s) comfort with technology will go away as they get older. They have no loyalty to media institutions like their parents did…. news has to be produced specifically for and directed to the audiences of the future, and reach them in the ways they want. (and) go far beyond who said what yesterday or the day before…. News executives need to think about their products as participatory community institutions, not merely as distributors of their own creative output….One recent study said the popular, free Internet site, craigslist (www.craigslist.com), had cost San Francisco Bay Area newspapers $50- $65 million in job listing revenue alone.

• “Laying the Newspaper Gently Down to Die,” by Jay Rosen of New York University, March 29, 2005:

Traditional (news) products are in some combination of strategic, journalistic and financial peril….The existing business model has been “irreversibly undermined” by new technology.

• “Six things that should be on the agenda (at the upcoming American Society of Newspaper Editors’ convention.” Tim Porter posting to Morph, The Media Center blog on April 4, 2005:

The death of newspapering as a viable economic and social medium is increasingly being foretold even by its practitioners. What do the gatekeepers of journalism’s largest platform offer at their annual convention in the face of this bleak future? Bromides, blinders and an oddly self-abusing submission to speeches from politicians who disdain, abuse and manipulate the very press these editors are charged with preserving.

• “Reversing the Slide,” by Rachel Smolkin, American Journalism Review, April/May 2005. This article tells of struggles at the Washington Post as that venerable newspaper looks to attract new readers in an era when focus-group participants turn up their noses at the offer of free subscriptions.
• “Saving Journalism: How to nurse the good stuff until it pays,” by Philip Meyer, author of “The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age,” writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, Nov/Dec 2004:

(Newspapers’) business model has been irreversibly undermined by new technology. ….The behavior of most points in this direction: smaller newshole, lighter staffing, and reduced community service, leading, of course, to fading readership, declining circulation, and lost advertising. Plot it on a graph, and it looks like a death spiral.

• “Farewell to Newspapers– Will Increased News Options on the Web Lead to the Death of Newspapers?”Commentary by Michael S. Malone, Mar. 24, 2005:

I still read the news, much of it coming from the newspapers I used to religiously read. But I am not reading the “paper,” either literally or figuratively, that the publishers want me to read. Throughout the day, I construct my own newspaper in cyberspace, a real-time assemblage of wire service stories, newspaper features, blogs, bulletin boards, columns, etc. I suspect most of you do, too….. So, let’s finally come out and say: Newspapers are dead. They will never come back. By the end of this decade, the newspaper industry will suffer the same death rate — 90-plus percent — that every other industry experiences when run over by a technology revolution…. (Most newspaper people) are unbelievably retrograde. They grew up in a world of newsprint and that’s where they intend to stay. They cannot believe an institution as venerable as the newspaper can ever go away.

• San Jose Mercury News executive editor Susan Goldberg’s speech to college journalists, (scroll down to find it), Feb. 25, 2005:

When I started my career, you almost never met an educated person who would admit to not reading the newspaper. Today, you meet them every day — and these are not the clueless people of the world. Instead, too often, these are smart, well-schooled, busy professionals who, in the world of instant information from any number of accessible sources, find they do not need us anymore…. One of the worst aspects of our business (is) a resistance to change. Actually, it’s worse than resistance – it’s a fear of change that borders on the pathological. For a group of people who tend to be liberal, we are mighty conservative when it comes to our own profession….You know, there’s an old saw about the train industry — that it loved trains so much that it didn’t realize it was in the transportation business, not the train business. The analogy for us would be that we love newspapers so much that some of us refuse to recognize that we are in the information business – not just the business of putting ink on dead trees.

• Speech by Alan Nelson, creator of the the Command Post blog, to the Associated Press Managing Editors, October, 2004:

The newsroom of the future is going to have to reconcile itself to the Law of the Many … there will be thousands of people who will not only scrutinize your reporting, but they will do so via a network that can tangibly drive public awareness and opinion….My advice? Embrace reader participation … like the laws of the flow, fast, and few, the law of the many is inevitable, and you’re better off engaging bloggers and readers as part of the process … it means more openness, and more tolerance for feedback and criticism … but when it comes to the mob, I’d rather have them working with me than against me.

• “Come 2017, it’ll be the web wot wins it,” London Observer column by Peter Preston, March 13, 2005.

In 1996, just 3 per cent of American adults cited the internet as one of their two main election news sources. Last year it was 18 per cent, a sixfold spurt. In ’96, some 60 per cent of American voters said the print media were an influence on their election decision. Last year, that was down to 39 per cent.

• “Blah Blah Blog,” by Jesse Oxfeld, Editor and Publisher, April 7, 2005.

“Debating” whether blogs belong in the journalism is debating whether the genie should have left the bottle: Whether you like it or not — and most do like it — it’s done. (snip) For all the utility of blogs and other online sources for directing me to news, of finding shortcomings in news, of analyzing news, the actual reporting of that news, from which all the analysis and watchdogging and bloggery and so forth arises, is still largely done by those same old traditional news outlets. Which, as (Jill) Abramson (of the New York Times) noted at Harvard, still costs a lot of money.