Piggy-backing on Dave’s post about confirmation bias in the professional press, I thought I’d share an interesting post with you and add a few thoughts of my own on the fall of the newspaper business.
First, the link. I urge you to read Ken Anderson’s post in which he weaves together the declining fortunes of the New York Times, the problems with the business model for print journalism, and Veblen’s theory of the leisure class. The four part series are among the very best blog posts I’ve ever read. I won’t try to excerpt them—read them for yourself in full.
Now, my own observations about the newspaper business. My dad was a newspaper editorial writer (in addition to being a lawyer). We had lots of family friends in the newspaper business including the managing editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.  Old friends of mine include the chap who for many years was the editor of Parade Magazine, the Sunday newspaper insert, the current Sunday book editor of the Washington Post, and lots of other print and broadcast journalists. I’ve had an interest in and fondness for the newspaper business for as long as I can recall.
The newspaper business model is not dead, it is merely unemployed.  There is plenty of space for purveyors of local facts and local advertising and will be for the foreseeable future. The amount of money that can be made in that business is limited, too limited for these organizations to be acquired in leveraged buyouts and conglomerated. There are small independent newspapers that aren’t highly leveraged that are getting by even in today’s economic climate.
As Ken Anderson notes, the New York Times isn’t a daily newspaper any more.  It’s a daily magazine and journal of opinion targeted at the national elite, confirming for them just how elite they are. Judging by the Times’s stock value, there isn’t any place for such an organ or at least there isn’t enough money in it to make the Sulzberger family happy. That doesn’t mean that the NYT will die any time soon it just means that it will transform into something that is economically viable. I hope that’s a solid local newspaper but it may be a smaller journal of opinion or even a hobby for its rich owners. It won’t be the NYT we’ve known over the years it will be something quite different although its cachet may remain for many years.
Too many newspaper editors and writers right down to the local level slavishly imitate the NYT. Do they see it as auditioning? Hoping they’ll be discovered like Lana Turner, sitting in her sweater on a stool at Schwab’s Drug Store?
Facts are expensive, opinion is cheap, free even, and worth every penny. Journals of opinion whether they are blogs or nationally distributed print newspapers aren’t replacements or even competitors for purveyors of facts, they have a symbiotic or commensal relationship with purveyors of facts. The Wall Street Journal has demonstrated that there is a solid business model at least within its own specialized niche for a national or international purveyor of facts. I don’t know what the business model is going to be for getting the facts we think of as the news from all over the world.  It may be done by some solid, reliable aggregator of hyperlocal international news. The business model for that hasn’t emerged yet.
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This would seem to confirm what many of us already think. My opinion along similiar lines is that journalists tell a story. Reporters report facts and they have all retired or died fron old age.
Ken Anderson’s 4-part piece was one of the better analyses I’ve seen of what the New York Times really is–and it lays out fairly well why it’s very unlikely their current business model will work. Do you really need a daily version of The New Yorker or Harper’s?
It’s rather sad really, because no one who’s read the paper can deny that they’re dynamite good writers. But they simply are not trustworthy. I’m not sure if they ever were, but I’m sure they aren’t now, which is why any time I read any story and I see that its source was the New York Times, I check myself and wonder how much of what I’m reading I should believe to be factual. That may seem unfair–I have absolutely no doubt that there are many many fine and honest reporters working for that paper–but the editorial policies of the paper demand it
I think the best thing that could be done for the paper is probably to rip it out of the control of the Schulzberg clan and put someone who actually cares about hard news in charge.
As for a business model that works in the modern world: I suspect that Oh My News in South Korea is a model that would work if anyone wanted to establish it here.
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