Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 3, No. 2 | Abandoning the News, page 2

While it is premature to definitively judge the impact of this revolution on public affairs, political discourse or on journalism itself, the writing is on the wall: the course of how the news will be delivered in the future has already been altered and more changes are undoubtedly on the way. How can we expect anything else, when the average age of a print newspaper reader is 53 and the average age of both broadcast and cable news viewers is about the same? Baby boomers read newspapers one-third less than their parents and the Gen Xers read newspapers another one-third less than the Boomers.

Whether the industry is reacting fast enough to these dramatic changes is another question altogether. “By and large, the major news companies are still turning a blind eye to what is happening because it's challenging and they need to consider radical change,” says researcher Rusty Coats, Director of New Media at Minnesota Opinion Research, Inc. (MORI). “[Change is] way too incremental at this point,” he continues. “Major newspaper companies are embracing the Internet but are still using it as a supplement or as a means to sell print subscriptions and not seeing its unique value.” Coats points out that there's a “big buzz” within the newspaper industry about developing “loyalty programs,” marketing efforts designed to deepen the customer's commitment to a given product. So a subscriber to the Chicago Tribune, for example, might receive airline discounts as part of a program. “I'm all for rewarding valuable customers but I wish there was more thought devoted to developing new products. Does a newspaper publishing a youth-oriented web site once a month or once a week really think this will cause fundamental change? The real issue is how are we going to [compete with] Yahoo?” In that regard, Coats suggests that maybe big papers “need to own cellular services” or other large distribution vehicles to reach new audiences. What is needed, Coats and others argue, is a substantial commitment to new product development, investments that news companies—even in their triumphant days of dominance and vast profitability—were reluctant to make.

But these issues can no longer be swept aside by the news oligopolies that have dominated the latter part of the 20th century, as news executives and researchers generally agree. Indeed, those who gather, report and administer the delivery of news are increasingly focusing on the reality that technology, the enormous variety of media choices, demographics and to a certain extent, the struggles of traditional news organizations and the journalism community to adjust to change, have left mass audience, mass media newsgathering and dissemination in peril. And that's unlikely to change. As Lewis Dvorkin, AOL's top editorial executive and a long-time news executive warns, “I don't think that with the lifestyles of people today, the demands on people's time, today's family life and the extended hours of work, people will come back to the old ways of consuming the news.”

Until recently, however, managers in the newspaper industry, for example, generally avoided confronting the decades of data about declining use of newspapers among the younger members of society. Instead, they took what is turning out to be false comfort in historic data that generally affirmed the view that older citizens always wind up with the familiar local newspaper because of their interest in world affairs, their pocketbooks, concern with local schools and the issues of modern life. But there's no denying that the numbers are changing. The deterioration of the newspaper marketplace has been steady among young people and would appear to be accelerating. From 1972 to 1998, the percentage of people age 30-to-39 who read a paper every day dropped from 73 to 30 percent. And in just the years between 1997 and 2000, the percentage of 18-to-24-year-olds who say they read yesterday's newspaper dropped by 14 percent, according to the Newspaper Association of America. The only conclusion to be reached after noting these trends is that no future generation of new consumers will fit earlier profiles since their expectations and their habits have changed forever—and technology is a big part of the reason why.

“Young people are more curious than ever but define news on their own terms,” says Jeff Jarvis, who is president of Advance.net, a unit of Advance Publications, and who publishes a widely read blog, Buzzmachine.com. “They get news where they want it, when they want it. Media is about control now. We used to wait for the news to come to us. Now news waits for us to come to it. That's their expectation. We get news on cable and on the Internet any time, any place.”

What this means is that American journalism institutions face risks of extraordinary magnitude. To be sure, the news industry is an evolving business, but even within that context, recent changes in the news business must be viewed as a wake-up call for all involved. Consider the fact that broadcast television's evening news programs, for example, are no longer the family hearth that brings people throughout the country together at meal time. Or that television networks, which used to employ dozens of high-profile correspondents around the world, now deploy just a few. (Certainly, in the years leading up to September 11, 2001, international reporting on television was in rapid decline, often almost invisible on national television.) Afternoon newspapers have disappeared from American life and cities that for decades had multiple newspaper choices now often have but one. The New York Times, USA Today and The Wall Street Journal are available on street corners throughout the country. The daily audiences of national news web sites dwarf those of their print counterparts.

Even the accepted, historic premise of how a free press and the skills of journalism bind together democratic institutions similarly merits a certain reassessment and reality check. There is little evidence that today's politicians accept the notion that it's mandatory to connect to the population via a “national press corps,” often choosing to go around the press and communicate through their own Internet sites, through friendly talk shows and blog forums.

Next page: The development of free papers represents the largest single media industry response yet to the readership collapse. What’s less clear is what these “newspaper-lite” products mean for journalism.

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