5 reasons that newspapers will die

I was reading a post over on Daggle about newspapers bleating about their dying business model. It reminded me of some special-interest pleading from the hateful ideologue Polly Toynbee in the Guardian recently – essentially arguing that journalism is so important to democracy that the government should step in to provide subsidies to newspapers to continue the great work they do.

It’s time for the newspapers to get real – and to do so before they follow other industries into obsolescence. Aside from residual loyalty to long-established brand names and a credible pool of writing talent, the role they face in the future is vastly diminished by the accumulated talents of the internet and the economics of Free.

1. Journalists are rarely technical specialists
   The first thing a newspaper looks for in a journalist is not field expertise, but generic writing chops. If you’re a good writer, you may find yourself assigned as a newspapers’ education correspondent one day and the sports editor the next. That’s because a talented writer can assimilate information and make a convincing-sounding piece about almost any subject with the barest understanding of what they are writing about.

   As an SEO, I often have to write content that taps into my clients’ areas of specialism. It isn’t infrequent for them to ask me where I’m sourcing my material from or for them to assume that it has been copied wholesale from a publication. This isn’t to blow my own trumpet, but if you have a certain facility for language and structure it is relatively easy to fake expertise in front of laymen.

   Of course, that is a skill in itself and has a value, but it means that much of what we read in the papers is necessarily not written from a position of real understanding. Just because something is well-written, plausible sounding and smattered with apparent facts it does not follow that it is accurate in any way at all.

2. Too much ‘news’ is merely PR and the internets make it impossible to hide
   Given that journalists are rarely technical specialists it is an easy win to place PR hokum into the mainstream media as a factual story. If  you read Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science (which to its credit The Guardian runs as a regular column) you’ll quickly find yourself appalled at the ease with which fact-free PR puffery finds its way into the nation’s discourse.

   In the days before Google and blogging and everything else that comes as standard these days, newspapers could get away with it. But if you start to look away from mainstream journalism into almost any subject, you start to discover the paucity of understanding on display in many allegedly ‘authorative’ news sources. Trust is the critical factor on which the newspapers have always traded. Today, that trust is leaking to the internet and independent sources of information. I don’t trust the BBC to critically report “climate change”. I do trust the likes of Climate Audit.

3. The pressure of deadlines make the first 3 points inevitable
   Newspapers are still largely wedded to the daily format by structure and necessity (no newspaper having yet abandoned a daily print run). In world where you got your news with a boiled egg at the breakfast table that made eminent sense. But because so much journalism is bound up with this daily schedule it leaves it ill-placed to deal with proper investigative reporting. There’s a tension here between the need for constant 24 hour churn and considered, well investigated writing. The independent media, personified in blogs, specialist websites and news aggregators fill that need better than a newspaper ever could.
4. Competing content is genuinely free
   In terms of long-term challenges to print media, the economics of free is perhaps the single most potent threat. Why pay for an opinion in The Times when you can get an equally illuminating, well-written opinion for nothing elsewhere? Again, in the Old World, where newspapers were the authorative source of information the model was the only way in which writers could actually earn a living by taking a salary as part of the newspapers’ overall take in ad revenue. Today? Well any number of amateurs now make a living self-publishing on the internet. While they lack the safety net and cachet that belonging to a print stable brings, they can earn money through affiliate schemes and self-publishing their collected works. The route to a mass audience no longer has to take you through the sweathouse of local media.
5. Editorial lines diminish creativity
   A strong editor can improve the work of their writers – of that there can be no doubt. How much meandering cack is left on the cutting room floor of your typical daily rag is impossible to guess, but presumably there are millions of words lost to us every day. In the online sphere, of course, editorial lines are held by the content creator more or less alone – although with critical feedback being instant and transparent, you could say that the readership has become the editor.

Perhaps the best defense put against this analysis is provided in a comment on Toynbee’s piece, in which a commentor – apparently a journalist – asks some trenchant questions:

“How many bloggers will go knocking on doors in a tough estate when a young black man has been killed in an apparently racist attack and nobody will talk to the police?”

This rather begs the much more important question of why people won’t talk to the police and how we can resolve this problem rather than using it as a prop to justify the existence of journalists. The correct answer is not “subsidise a newspaper” – it’s actually “build trust in the police and offer a level of protection so that witnesses will talk.” It’s far more challenging a prospect, but ultimately we shouldn’t be relying on the Newtown Bugle & Herald as an adjunct to the police.

“Who is going to troop hundreds of miles across the country on a cold Wednesday night to make sure there is a football report written for first thing the nest morning?”

Well any number of websites actually. More often than not people who actually follow the team and who aren’t afraid of venting opinions far more entertaining than those put forward by your typical local rag. During my years of (saints preserve us!) following Leeds United, I’ve frequented messageboards far more commonly than the Yorkshire Post. This also misses the point of how much of this reporting is actually any good. Is there really enough value in hundreds of different perspectives on one football game to justify their preponderance?

“Who is going to ring up British Gas to get an elderly woman’s power supply restored in the middle of winter?”

A heartbreaking example for sure, but an example that really has no validity. Millions of people do actually commit similarly altruistic acts on behalf of friends, neighbours and relatives without it ever making the papers or being co-opted into it a self-serving “campaign”. That some people suffer – and even die – unnecessarily for beauracratic shortcomings is a tragedy for society at large, and it is not clear why it is the prerogative of the journalist alone to redress this. Can the journalist act as a whistleblower, advocate and focus for a campaign? Sure. Does this mean that non-journalists can’t act fulfill the same role? No.

Perhaps the most singular argument remaining in favour of the press is that  news organisation will have more resources to defend its writers against malicious prosecution by those who would wish to stymie criticism or unveil uncomfortable truths. There is something in this claim. But whether the traditional view of libel can now ever hold sway in a world of billions of instant electronic messages and untraceable data