The Challenge Facing Newspapers

It’s rare a week goes by that I don’t read about the severe challenges facing the newspaper industry. Advertising revenue for most newspapers’ online versions are soaring, but as this story points out, it is not enough to offset the losses on the traditional print side of the business. While most of these stories have focused on the problem, Doc Searls offers some interesting solutions. Doc’s pedigree, that includes editor, author, writer and, perhaps, ”Founding Father” of the Live Web digerati, certainly qualifies his ideas to be taken seriously. As an avid reader of newspaper and the Live Web, I find his thoughts to represent clear thinking in what is presently a foggy newspaper landscape.

However, tumultuous change doesn’t necessarily foster clear thinking within any industry, and newspapers are no exception. Newspapers’ reactions to the challenges of living in a wired, instant-news world seem to be following the classic Kübler-Ross model on the Five Stages of Grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. I think the industry is now beyond denial, but the anger and bargaining seem to be in full play. No doubt further cuts in revenues and newspaper staffs in 2007 (see State of the News Media 2007) will add to the depression stage, too.

Last will come acceptance, but first the industry must reframe the challenge they got wrong in the first place: treating the Web as an extension of their print world and not seeing it as something totally unique (see Harvard Working Knowledge story). It is difficult to foresee how this situation will all shake out in the end, but journalism and journalists are a vital part of our society and economy. A lot of good people who take bits and pieces and turn it into interesting and valuable reading for newspapers have lost their jobs. I don’t think that is good news for anybody because both the offline and online world will suffer as a result.