A few years ago Paul Bass and I appeared on a Connecticut radio station to talk about the future of local journalism. Bass was and is the founder, editor, and publisher of the New Haven Independent , a nonprofit, online-only news organization that is the main subject of my book The Wired City .
Bass and I both came out of the world of alternative weeklies. He was the star reporter for the New Haven Advocate. I was the media columnist for the Boston Phoenix. While we were on the air, he told a story about a club owner in New Haven who had once advertised heavily in the Advocate—but had found he could reach a better-targeted audience on Facebook while spending next to nothing.
Need I tell you that both the Advocate and the Phoenix have gone out of business?
I’m dredging up this anecdote because the Columbia Journalism Review has published a much-talked-about essay arguing that newspapers made a huge mistake by embracing all things digital and should instead have doubled down on print. Michael Rosenwald writes that instead of chasing ephemeral digital revenues, newspapers should have built up their print editions and offered more value to their readers.
Rosenwald happens to be a reporter for the Washington Post, and yes, he writes that he’s aware of the irony given the Post’s digital success under the ownership of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.
The print-versus-digital debate, needless to say, is old and often tiresome. Most memorably, prioritizing print over online was what Aaron Kushner tried to do at the Orange County Register in California starting in 2012. It ended badly , though that was mainly a consequence of hiring way too many people. Still, the Kushner experience shows that print simply can’t sustain a newspaper the way it once did, even if a typical paper’s print edition remains more lucrative than its digital operation.
By far the most important effect of digital media was to pull revenues away from newspapers. This would have happened even if no newspaper had ever launched a website. Think about the New Haven club owner cited by Bass and multiply that story over and over. Businesses simply don’t need the local newspaper to connect with their customers to anywhere near the extent that they once did.
And think about Craigslist. As recently as a dozen or so years ago, classified ads provided 40 percent of a typical daily newspaper’s revenue. Now it’s pretty much gone, and it’s not coming back. Craigslist simply offered a better product: classifieds that were almost entirely free.
Writing in Politico, Jack Shafer says we shouldn’t “blame” Craigslist founder Craig Newmark for the demise of newspapers. Well, no, not in a moral sense. There is absolutely nothing wrong with coming along and offering a better product. But newspapers were utterly dependent on monopoly pricing for classifieds in order to pay for their journalism. Craigslist employs a total of 40 people, according to the company’s FAQ . The Boston Globe’s newsroom, to name just one example, employs roughly seven times that.
Here’s Rosenwald’s argument in a nutshell:
Two decades have passed since newspapers launched websites, and yet here we are. Big city papers have gone under, thousands of journalists have lost their jobs, and the idea that digital news will eventually become a decent business feels like a rumor. The reality is this: No app, no streamlined website, no “vertical integration,” no social network, no algorithm, no Apple, no Apple Newsstand, no paywall, no soft paywall, no targeted ad, no mobile-first strategy has come close to matching the success of print in revenue or readership.
That’s all true. But print is not even remotely what it used to be. Circulation and advertising are down drastically, and they continue to fall. According to the Pew Research Center , print newspaper advertising revenues dropped from $47 billion to $16 billion between 2005 and 2014, and the bottom is not in sight. At this point, the only real path left is to charge for online access and hope to eke out enough money to turn a small profit. That’s the route taken by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and many regional papers, including the Globe.
You sometimes hear arguments that newspapers should dump their print editions and go all-digital. That makes no sense. You go where the revenues are. You can be sure that when your local newspaper discovers that the costs of producing a print edition exceed the income, it will go digital-only.
But it makes no sense to think that print can be resurrected as a sustainable business model for newspapers in an age when paid classified ads are all but gone, display advertising is on the wane, and the most news-obsessed readers are consuming media from a wide variety of online sources.
