A business perspective on newspapers

While the tide of doom-and-gloom, self-loathing articles about the demise of newspapers has slowed down, I thought this article by Daniel Gross in Slate, examining the industry from a business perspective, was a unique take. Here's the money line:

While newspapers have serious problems, the recent failures of several newspaper
companies shouldn't necessarily lead to visions of the apocalypse... the
failures may say more about a style of capitalism than an industry. Each company
was undone in large measure by really stupid (and in one case criminal)
activities by managers.

I think it's a bit oversimplistic to simply blame "a bunch of private equity types," although clearly capitalism and newspapers aren't a good mix right now. But while Gross thinks its a certain type of capitalism that caused the demise of newspapers, I'm inclined to believe it's more of a general, growing perception that information should be free. And I'm willing and able to admit my generation is guilty as charged.

Time and NY Times weigh in on newspapers

A couple more interesting reads out there on the future of newspapers. Both advocate for some sort of pay-per-view model for online news, arguing that advertising is not enough to generate the quality or quantity of news content we need.

The firrst, from Time Magazine, says there's some hope in a future "micropayment" system where, like we've become accustomed to paying $0.99 for a song on iTunes, we'll someday pay a couple pennies for each news story we read on iNews (or, more likely, each news source's Web platform):

Under a micropayment system, a newspaper might decide to charge a nickel for an article or a dime for that day's full edition or $2 for a month's worth of Web access. Some surfers would balk, but I suspect most would merrily click through if it were cheap and easy enough.

In the NY Times, David Carr advocates for something similar. He also points out that the traditional regulations that have prevented newspaper mergers in a single market are outdated and have prevented some necessary consolidation. I'd like to add that antitrust laws keeping newspapers and TV stations from merging are also too old-fashioned, at some point they're both going to be doing the same thing on the Web, so we might as well get them working together now. The traditional barriers are meaningless, and meanwhile the old stalwarts are crumbling. Here's the money quote from newspaper analyst John Morton:

“Only newspapers are economically organized to cover a broad swath of events,” he said. “A lot of aggregators have been taking advantage of that, and pretty soon, there will be nothing to aggregate. But that can’t really be discussed among newspaper owners because of antitrust problems.”

Clearly, newspapers have done a lot to get themselves in this hole. But outdated regulations shouldn't be making the problem worse.

More on newspapers

I happened upon this essay, originally from The New Republic, this morning when I was reading the recap of last night's Kings game on The Sacramento Bee's Web site. The author, Princeton Professor Paul Starr, does a good job summarizing the current state of newspapers and analyzing their importance to the public. I thought it was interesting he referred to news as a "public good" here:

Public goods are notoriously underproduced in the marketplace, and news is a public good – and yet, since the mid-19th century, newspapers have produced news in abundance at a cheap price to readers and without need of direct subsidy.

Public goods usually are something you want the government to subsidize, since the market is not producing the optimal amount on its own. I expected Starr to follow with some proposal for the government to subsidize newspapers, which, thankfully, he didn't. Not every paper can be BBC or NPR, and the idea of the watchdog having a tie to the government makes me nervous.

Taking a step back, the fact that I even stumbled upon this story shows that reading news on the Web isn't all bad. Many have cited the "serendipity" that print newspapers allow--the stories that you wouldn't go out of your way to read, but are happy you found--and lamented that there is no such parallel online. But that's not necessarily true, as I found out this morning.