Newspapers may be going the way of the horse-and-buggy.
Major dailies like Denver’s Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer have crumpled into extinction. Philadelphia’s two papers are both on the ropes. And Ann Arbor, Michigan has won the distinction of being the first U.S. city with no traditional daily newspaper.
According to almost everyone, including reporters and editors in most newsrooms , the era of the daily newspaper is over. They simply cannot compete with the internet, which is scooping them on breaking news and rustling most of their advertisers.
But this obituary gets the facts wrong. Actually, the readership and reach of quality newspapers is stronger than ever because of the web. Even as home deliveries and newsstand sales slide, the internet is bringing huge numbers of new readers seeking the in-depth reporting that newspapers offer.
It’s not newspapers themselves that are outdated (presuming you still call them newspapers when printed online) but the business model that carried them through the 20th Century—slender profits from circulation on top of fat money from advertising.
To conceive a different business model for newspapers to survive, we must start by thinking differently about newspapers themselves—not as a business at all but as a public service, a part of the information commons.
A city with a good newspaper (whether online, print or, ideally, both) benefits in numerous ways beyond the profits (if any) it re-circulates through the community. Local businesses, the government sector, the arts scene, the sports world, neighborhoods and citizens in general are all better off thanks to the useful information that newspapers provide. San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom sums it up well in thinking about the precarious fate of his city’s leading daily: “The Chronicle plays an important role in our civic life and we don’t want to see this treasured institution close its doors.”
The horse-and-buggy analogy truly doesn’t work with newspapers. Horse-and-buggies were replaced with something that did their job just as well (even if it did pollute the air and wreak havoc in city streets). That’s not the case with newspapers. Radio or TV news, weeklies and the proliferation of niche websites hardly ever provide the same kind of community forum as a traditional newspaper with a newsroom full of reporters eager to explore the breadth and depth of the city in search of what people need to know.
Like libraries, good schools, civic organizations, public transit, social services, parks and police (none of which are expected to turn a profit) newspapers are part of what ensures a healthy, prosperous, vital community. All these vital public assets are a part of the commons.
If newspapers look odd on this list of institutions that are primarily the responsibility of government agencies or non-profit organizations, that’s because we are stuck in old ways of thinking about information. We live in an era frequently characterized as the “Information Age” or the “Knowledge Economy,” which means that reliable sources of news are more essential to our lives than ever.
Before World War II, most public transit agencies were privately owned and would have looked funny on a list like this. And like good newspapers today they were generally run to benefit the community rather than just their shareholders, who often were real-estate developers or major employers who made money indirectly from trolleys and buses.) But today no one would exclude public transit as a central part of the commons. And in a few years, no one will question newspapers—that is, if they make it.
If we view daily newspapers as an essential public service that we cannot afford to lose, how do we keep them publishing? There’s probably not one answer, but in looking at how other important but not-necessarily profitable institutions survive, here are some commons-based solutions.
Taxpayer Support through an Independent Agency. Search no further than NPR, PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for a successful example of Americans receiving high quality news and culture in return for a tiny portion of their tax dollars.
Reader Support and Sponsorships. Public radio and television offer other practical ways for paying the high costs of providing information. Readers, foundations, civic organizations and perhaps businesses could underwrite quality reporting.
Community Ownership. No one owns the Green Bay Packers. Shares of the team are widely spread out among people of the community. Why not the Los Angeles Times or Boston Globe?
Non-Profit Status. Own of America’s most respected newspapers, the St. Petersburg Times, has been owned for many years by the non-profit Poynter Institute. A number of other non-profit experiments are underway, including MinnPost, a new online daily in Minneapolis-St. Paul that boasts that it the only news organization to open—rather than close—a Washington bureau last year.