(how to) save the newspapers

A fantastic article in The American by newspaper veteran Jonathan Yardley on "how to save an American institution"...

Yardley has been the book editor at the Washington Post for a long time-- and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981. He opens the essay by recounting the impact of the third (and largest) down-sizing for the WP this summer-- and describing his professional journey-- before turning to what to do with "an industry in crisis", with rapidly declining ad revenue and circulation.

More than ever before in my memory, editorial decisions at newspapers are being influenced, and in many cases completely determined, by financial considerations. The question is not whether those realities are going to change newspapers, but how. That newspapers are faced with this imperative is more than slightly ironic, because for all their reputation as hotbeds of liberalism, institutionally they are, and always have been, implacably conservative. They resist change stubbornly and usually do not handle it very adeptly when it is forced on them....

Their response in the 1980s and 1990s to television generally and the rise of cable specifically, for example, was to fall all over themselves trying to imitate USA Today, while failing to recognize that (a) USA Today was sui generis and thus inherently inimitable, and (b) reducing the length of stories, cutting back on jumps from section fronts, putting cluttered contents boxes on those fronts, emphasizing celebrity news, and falling head over heels in love with graphics and design were not the most sensible response to the needs and desires of all newspaper readers....

My impression is that now, when newspapers need to change as never before, too often they are floundering, caught between a past they don’t want to lose and a future they find (understandably) hard to comprehend...

From there, Yardley turns to the prospects of "the Newspaper of Tomorrow"...

I am convinced that for the daily print newspaper—as opposed to its Internet side—“soft” is the way to go. By “soft” I don’t just mean features, reviews, and op-ed commentaries, though those should be important to the newspaper of the future. I also mean the investigative reporting essential to any good newspaper’s mission and reports that go beyond the news, that concentrate less on what happened and more on what it means. The Internet is very good at telling us what happened, as any follower of the 2008 presidential election can attest, but not so good at interpreting it. A lot of screaming takes place on the Internet, in blogs, chat rooms, and other forums, but there’s not much informed, measured explanation and analysis—forms of journalism at which, as it happens, newspapers have a lot of experience and can do well...

It has to stop worrying about the size of its circulation and start worrying about the quality of that circulation. It has to identify people within its reach who still want to read the news—read it, that is, not pick it up in quick online hits or hear it in bits and pieces on television or radio—and who want to it on paper. Instead of dumbing down—making stories shorter and snappier, assuming that readers have the intellectual curiosity of couch potatoes—it has to smarten up. It has to give readers meatier articles, analyses, and opinion pieces, and it has to give these to them not in a daily newspaper but in a daily magazine.

Newspapers as we now know them are printed in the large format known as broadsheet. Fold it in half and you get the tabloid, traditionally the format for sensational urban newspapers and sneered at by the journalistic establishment. Yet the tabloid form, or some variation thereof, would be perfect for a daily magazine. As Newsday readers have known for years, the tabloid is more congenial to the reader than the broadsheet: easier to hold, easier to take in a full page at a glance, and more adaptable in challenging reading environments such as trains....

...the newspaper of the future will have no need to publish most of the ephemera with which it is now cluttered—stock-market tables, baseball box scores, movie and television listings, brief news items from around the state, the nation, and the world— because it’s all easily available on the Internet. Huge amounts of money now poured into newsprint and ink could be saved by switching from broadsheet to tabloid (as The Times of London did four years ago) and by shrinking not merely the physical size of the paper but also its number of pages....

What many editors and readers may not realize is that newspapers already are moving in this direction, whether deliberately or not I do not know....

Could this advertiser be lured back if the Post’s circulation shrank to, say, 350,000 and ad rates were reduced accordingly? I have no idea. But I suspect that a newspaper with a more tightly controlled circulation, focused on loyal readers and upmarket neighborhoods, would be more appealing than one that, in today’s radically altered marketplace, casts a much wider net than most advertisers are willing or able to pay for. I know this runs contrary to just about everything newspaper people have believed for as long as I can remember—bigger is better—and I know it sounds “elitist,” in the unfashionable sense of the word, but the world has changed....