I grew up in a newspaper family. My grandfather ran a small town
journal. My father headed up the advertising department of a chain
of suburban weeklies and later published his own weekly paper in
Florida. I have lived through the switchover from letterpress to
offset printing, through the death of the evening daily (done in by
TV news), through declining circulation, through price hikes in
newsprint, and through the Internet.
I’ve set type, run printing presses, sold advertising, written
stories, done page layouts, and edited sections. I cannot remember
a time when newspapers weren’t — in some way — going in the tank,
failing, losing circulation, or losing money.
Yet we still have newspapers, and newspapers continue to be a
force — in the shaping of information and public opinion, and in
the political life of the nation. They do so in spite of comically
bad management, the near-total disregard of the usual high-profit
demographic (the one that goes to the malls and the multiplexes),
their sheer wrongheadedness in matters of public policy, and the
alienation of their writers from the lives of everyday people.
IN ONE OF HIS books, humorist Dave Barry made fun of the usual way
that newspapers try to turn around declining circulation. They look
at their readership, they find out that younger people don’t read
the paper, and they decide to appeal to the readers they don’t have
— or at least try. The paper’s panjandrums determine to make their
graphics kickier, to run more youth-oriented features, to cover
entertainment, to make the product livelier and more fun.
Of course, the effort fails. The paper can’t compete in the
entertainment and fun market with TV, radio, and (for those of the
younger set who read) specialty teen magazines. Instead, the
newspaper prints less of what its dedicated readers want, and
therefore loses more of its core audience. Five years later, says
Barry, they do the same thing all over again.
Ironically, everybody used to read Dave Barry. If you could
field a newspaper full of Dave Barrys, there would be no problem
with the medium at all.
THE DECLINE AND FALL of newspapers mirrors a publishing failure in
the past, that of general interest national magazines. Used to be
everybody read Look, Life, Collier’s,
and the Saturday Evening Post. Those giants of publishing
collapsed in the 1960s and 1970s, and we have not seen anything
like them again.
But magazines did not disappear. In the language of marketing,
the large, vertically oriented national journals gave way to dozens
of horizontally marketed specialty magazines. The 1970s saw the
flowering of the city magazine: New York, Texas
Monthly, San Francisco, Washingtonian, and
so forth.
At the same time, new magazines sprang up to address specific
niche audiences. At the time, I worked for a publisher’s
representative (an ad sales agency) that took pride in having sold
the first credit card ad to Ms.
To the surprise of most of us in the magazine biz, Ms.
is still around, witness a recent flap over the magazine’s refusal
to carry an ad from Israel. Eleanor Smeal, Reagan-era head of NOW
(and, I presume, still unable to pronounce the “d” in
“administration” or “admit”), edits the book.
The fragmenting of the magazine world presaged the development
of “narrowcasting” in cable television. Now, everyone can find his
or her special interest reflected in at least part of a cable
channel. Pool and poker could never have succeeded in national
media without a proliferation of channels. And to pursue the
parallel further, viewership of the big networks has fallen much
the same way that newspaper readership has.
JUST LIKE NETWORK TV, newspapers will survive. So savvy an
entrepreneur as Rupert Murdoch would not have bought the Wall
Street Journal unless he was sure he could make it into a
“big, big-titted hit” (to quote the Robert Duvall character in
Network).
Murdoch, opines Ed Lasky in the American
Thinker, will make his product a profitable market leader by
synergizing with other elements of his media empire, and by
infusing capital and talent into the newspaper.
Murdoch is a special case, aiming, as he does, to make the
Journal the pre-eminent newspaper in the U.S. For
publishers of more modest means and aims, the motto going forward
will be synergy and specialization. Some combination of the
Internet and print, some certain target audience, some canny design
and organization, all will point the way forward for the newspapers
of the future.
Some may look like professional journals, some may resemble the
rabble-rousing shout-sheets of the Colonial era, some may take off
from hobbyist enthusiasms. The big dailies like the New York
Times and the Washington Post will survive. At least
a few of the biggies have to, if for no other reason than to
provide content and direction for broadcast newsies — who can’t do
their own reading and research.
