mikolas

The Faulty Logic of Hanging on the Past

January 11, 2009 – 23:25 by Mikko Hämäläinen

Recently there has been more and more critique against so called citizen journalism, that in the mouth of trad media journos equals blogging, among traditional media workers. To quote a couple of the articles, while there are some truth in the thinking, I think the logic behind thinking is faulty.

From the opinion piece by Mar-Vic Cagurangan in Business Mirror:

There is nothing like the traditional ink-on-paper with full-time nosy reporters, wielding the good old pen and notebook or voice recorder, spending hours in the courthouse or the session hall, hunting stories day in and day out, annoying people with persistent phone calls. That’s not cheap.

“What is cheap,” New York columnists Ellis Heican writes, “is some self-absorbed nitwit sitting in front of a computer in his bathrobe, stealing the facts that some hardworking, lowly-paid newspaper drone just spent hours collecting.”

And to continue along the same lines, Paul Mushine writes in Wall Street Journal:

The problem is that printing a hard copy of a publication packed with solid, interesting reporting isn’t a guarantee of economic success in the age of instant news. Blogger Glenn Reynolds of “Instapundit” fame seems to be pleased at this. In his book, “An Army of Davids,” Mr. Reynolds heralds an era in which “[m]illions of Americans who were in awe of the punditocracy now realize that anyone can do this stuff.”

No, they can’t. Millions of American can’t even pronounce “pundit,” or spell it for that matter. On the Internet and on the other form of “alternative media,” talk radio, a disliked pundit has roughly a 50-50 chance of being derided as a “pundint,” if my eyes and ears are any indication.

So, what is the faulty logic behind these opinions? To begin with, we need to bring up a couple of issues that have been arising lately. First of all, the problem with newspapers is not the end product itself. The problem is the unsustainable business model in the long term and the fixed cost structure of running a newspaper. Consumer behavior has changed so the current model needs to evolve.

The business model as such is not dead end, however media spend is fragmenting as media consumption is evolving and current macroeconomic situation is actually turning something that was thought to be a cyclical downturn into real secular change in media mix of the advertisers. So there is a lot of money to be made, but sources of revenue are divided into small streams and are really hard to tap into, unless you have an agile organization with a flexible cost base. Does not sound like New York Times to me.

Secondly, blogs and “citizen journalism” might have started as a playing field of amateurs. However there is not any single reason why professional journalists could not start a blog, or some other form of online medium, on their own. I believe there always will be a need for high quality journalism, but it just might be that what we now call a newspaper is no longer the relevant medium for the online generation, nor is the one-size-fits-all general news portal.

There are many blog-like online services with high quality articles, very up-to-date information and experts in their respective fields. Sure, you have to follow a few dozen blogs around different subjects to have a same kind of “general media” experience you have with newspapers, but the upside is that the different specialized services have more and deeper content than any single general newspaper could afford to have. This is actually something that a newspaper simply cannot compete with.

From consumer, or reader if you will, point of view I get more out of my Google Reader than any single newspaper could provide: a broad variety of topics that are of my interest, 24/7 updated content and all of this for free. Heck, I can even link to the content I find interesting and promote it to others for immediate consumption in social services like Facebook and Twitter or simply sending it as a direct email or instant message if it involves some not so conventional humor. And all of these services also work very well via mobile handsets.

Regarding media going online, I think the prime example in Finland would be the rebirth of Uusi Suomi as pure online medium, with a different structure compared to traditional news media. I dare to say that no one would build anything like current newspaper companies, given the chance to build it ground up with current technology and in current multichannel consumer environment. Of course, there is a long way to go to reach the masses of Finland’s leading newspapers and newspaper web sites. However, when you do not have the burden of the past to drag along, you do not need to have massive readership (read: prospective eyeballs to look at the advertising) for achieving profitability.

And finally the usual argument that nobody is going to replace the work of paid journalists for free, is your grandfather’s argument. People are publishing massive amounts of content (or should I say intellectual property) for free. Enthusiasts have built an end-to-end computing environment for free. People are giving away arts and music for free. The thing is, generations change and with generations the culture is changing and dragging social changes along.

The cultural disruption enabled by the new technology is even more important than the technological one. I think this is something that goes totally forgotten whenever stressing the importance of technological change, although any self-respecting journalist should know the social and cultural effects of inventing the first truly efficient way to distribute information, namely the printing press. What we are now seeing is just as big change in the way information is distributed, whether it is a news article, classified ad, video on YouTube or some tweet on Twitter. Every bit of information can be shared, or broadcast, globally in real-time.

To sum it all up, I think there are a couple of things that are more real challenges within newspaper industry:

• Organizational inflexibility leading to suboptimal performance and inflated cost base. Consolidating operations in panic does not fix the underlying problems. How come each and every journalist promoting newspaper as a medium, underlines the cost of making a newspaper and somehow equals high cost with superior quality?
• Cultural inflexibility and resistance to change. It is the Internet’s fault! Well, no it is not. I think Clay Shirky made some very clever points about newspapers being like Russians in his interview in The Guardian. If there is something the industry really does not need is arrogant attitude towards the change.
• Losing touch with the online generation, and with that the cultural phenomenon. If you do not resonate with your audience (or worse, have none), how are you going to sell anything to them? Remember, the online generation of today are the media consumers and buyers of tomorrow.
• How do you compete with free (ad-supported or not) while being profitable? It is easy to fight free with free, but profitability is another issue. Maybe the traditional economics of scale do not work that well in online, except for ad networks. Is your cost base at the same level with the free competition? Probably not.
• How do you cope with the fact that cheap mass distribution of information is available to anyone? What is the real advantage of a newspaper if the news are in Twitter instantly and some professional blogger has an analysis out even before the ink has dried? Let’s face it: the newspaper industry no longer has monopoly on information.

I think these are tough questions and by looking at the situation, especially in the U.S., there are no answers yet.