Newspapers are too local!!!!!!!!!
It’s a fact. A Pulitizer Prize winner says so. Not only that, but they’re too small and need to be owned by corporate behemoths to ever be good. I wish I were making this up, but it’s all here, in the Washington Post.
Business writer Steven Pearlstein and I agree on some points. Newspapers have to surrender huge profit margins to survive … OK, so we agree on one point.
From there, his recommendations are astonishingly contemptuous of customers. Some highlights:
“Today there are 1,437 daily newspapers in the United States, of which all but 400 have circulations of under 25,000. At that size, it is unlikely they can ever be very efficient or, for that matter, very good.”
Many of those small will fail. So will many of the big papers. But being small has many advantages as well. It’s much easier to steer a 20-foot Bayliner than it is to steer The Titanic (oops, I mean a major metro). If, for example, a little paper’s press breaks, it’s a lot easier for it to find a contract printer than for the Titani … (sorry, there I go again) than it is for a metro to do the same.
He doesn’t address what makes these little papers not very good, but he offers hints along the way:
“To begin with, people are becoming better educated, more sophisticated and more global in their orientation, not less. The days are long gone when daily newspapers could satisfy readers — particularly the younger and more affluent readers that advertisers crave — by hiring inexperienced young reporters to write desultory stories about city council and planning board meetings or by filling much of the news hole with bowling scores, school lunch menus and bad photographs of high school sporting events.”
My god. Where to start?
I crave global news more than anyone I know. But not in a local newspaper. Printing day-old, truncated wire service reports that I’ve already read 10 times elsewhere is a recipe for disaster. The audience for the kind of global news most papers print is the less educated, less sophisticated and less global segment of readership. That’s not true for the audience of the Washington Post or New York Times, but for virtually every other market, the sophisticated readers are satisfying their hunger for global news by reading global sources. Online.
As global as my interests are, I pick up the local paper to read what the city council and planning board and water board are doing that affects me. So it doesn’t affect Steven Pearlstein. Who cares? As global as I am, I read local papers for the obits, new business listings, the honor rolls, the stories (and yes, bad photos) of local sporting events, looking for mentions of people I know.
For me, a bad photo of a Gaston High School sporting event in the Forest Grove News-Times beats a Pulitzer Prize winning photo from London hands down. I don’t think that’s because I’m poorly educated or less sophisticated than Mr. Pearlstein, either.
He says he wants papers to invest in new technology. So do I. But what sort of technology does he suggest? The kind I want makes information more personal, not more global. I don’t care if it’s online on newsprint, I want information I can’t find anywhere else. New technology that helps me find that information, whether it’s online blogs or hyper-local zones, makes sense.
Technology that produces the kind of local paper Mr. Pearlstein craves for would kill the newspaper industry just as surely as would more consolidation. Which by the way is another of his suggestions.
Just what the world wants. More generic fishwrappers published by arrogant editors in places like Washington D.C.
April 16th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
p.s.: “Who said that consolidation would lead to ignoring of local news? Not me, sir.” That’s a quote from the aforementioned Mr. Pearlstein, defending his column in which he called on papers to replace local news with global news.
So I guess my post is wrong. Read more of Mr. Pearlstein’s spin-doctoring in this item from the Post website, in which he also talks about how newspaper websites are really newspapers. Oh, doctor, is my head spinning.
So let’s see … if I started a newspaper based on this website, I guess that newspaper would really be a website …