What’s A Fish Without A Bicycle?

Michael Sokolove does a masterly job of pulling together all the journalistic angst of old school newspaper people when confronted with the bleak prospects of big city newspapers going under. It’s part wake, part crackpot economics, some recriminations about media companies moving to slow, a few mentions of craigslist: all the usual tropes.

[What’s a Big City Without a Newspaper? by Michael Sokolove]

There is every reason to believe that the big, grab-bag metro daily that mixes its news in with comics, advice columns, obituaries and recipes, and undertakes an expensive manufacturing and delivery operation each day to put the product on the street, will pass into history. Among the problems faced by Tierney and other publishers is that many of the big thinkers on the periphery of their industry — academics, Web entrepreneurs, former journalists with the wisdom of hindsight — have already moved on. They’re done with paper, ink, trucks, fuel, the whole era.

This drumbeat, a relentless declaration that print is doomed, may be a problem in and of itself, making it easy to cast anyone who wants to save print as a Luddite. In a widely read essay earlier this year, Clay Shirky, a professor at N.Y.U. and an Internet consultant, suggested embracing the current moment of flux. “That is what real revolutions are like,” he wrote. “The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place… . When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place.”

But parts of the system are actually not broken at all. Journalists still know how to gather news. And the Internet is a step forward in disseminating it. What’s broken is the pipeline that sends money back to where the content is created. Most of it is available to readers online, free, including on newspapers’ own Web sites, where it is not sufficiently supported by advertising.

The first paragraph in the selection above is something I was talking about the other day in an interview on this topic. The industrial era, integrated newspaper — with horoscopes, wedding announcements, politics, sports, comics, movies reviews and restaurant profiles — is going away. It may have made sense, as a convenience, when papers were delivered to your driveway, or read on the subway. But moving online, that model is rapidly changing.

And who thinks that it makes sense? Are all papers equally good at all sorts of journalism? Do I need the NY Times to have a sports section? Or review movies?

We are seeing the vertical supply chain of newspapers being blown apart into horizontal focus areas. That’s why the most interesting journalism start-ups are focused on one area, like politics, sports, or social change.

Newspapers defenders always start waving the Pulitzers and hard journalism in your face, trying to appeal to the social benefits of muckraking exposés of city hall malfeasance and the like. But that was never ‘paid for’ by the reader or the advertisers, per se. They never established a market value for it. It was underwritten by the car ads, and the classifieds. It was what publishers underwrote to fulfill a higher purpose, a social good, that the public or government wasn’t willing or able to directly underwrite. Maybe it was a way for industrialists to act as philanthropists, in a way, too.

Now these folks want to make us pay what the hard journalism costs to produce because the gravy train is over. They are going to erect pay walls around their news rooms with hundreds of reporters and dozens of editors. The are going to fix that break in “the pipeline that sends money back to where the content is created.”

Uh, no you aren’t, either.

This will simply precipitate a faster migration away from newspapers, online. It’s the last gasp of a failing system.

The young and the disenchanted are already getting news free from the TV networks. They’ll be happy if their ratings go up.

The webizens, like me, will continue to follow the wisest voices, even if they are operating outside the brand of big city papers.

The news barons might think that they can restructure copyright and fair use laws to plug those niddling little holes in ‘the pipeline that sends money back to where the content is created’, to stop us from quoting Paul Krugman’s op-ed piece, but it won’t hold up.

So Sokolove’s piece — entitled “What’s a Big City Without a Newspaper?” — is incongruous to me. Might as well be “What’s A Fish Without A Bicycle?” or “What’s An Opera Without A Volcano?”

I am a fan of local news, but that is not the sole focus of big city newspapers. They print car reviews, movie reviews, and stories about pirates in Somalia, none of which are local. They are a blur of things, and no one has ever tried to unblur them, really.

I suggest that what emerges from Shirky’s media revolution will be something profoundly unlike big city newspapers, today. They may jettison a lot of what is taken for granted, as well as inventing something that will attract people’s attention in this 21st century. It may be television blended with the web in some addictive way, like the Twitter mashups we are seeing on network news shows. But it won’t come from newspapers fighting rear guard actions like paywalls.