Inky Wretches

A couple of interesting meditations on the newspaper industry today. Generally, we just feel like we want to disagree on principal with such grandiose pronouncements as Michael Malone makes today over at ABC news, namely that “newspapers are dead.” All you need to do to refute such a silly claim is to look over the past fifty years of media history. Both television and radio were supposed to obsolete the printed word, but they didn’t—in fact, they helped build a readership which saw the inherent, qualitative differences in media. Now, according to Malone—a weird holdover from the heady days of the Web’s initial revolutionary zealots—the web will be the final coup de grace.

We hate to break it to Malone, but he simply doesn’t matter as much as he thinks he does: It is not the readers who will determine the fortunes of newspapers. It is the advertisers. We all know that readers are the third wheel in this relationship, have been for a long time… Recent circulation scandals are not scandals because they reflect badly on Americans reading less. They are a scandal because newspaper executives are lying to advertisers about their rate-bases. The basic paradigm—that advertising in print works—has not changed one iota, and there is a massive support industry designed to convince advertisers and publishers that their endless toil has the result they want to believe it does. (Interesting, innit, how there has been so much trouble transferring that same confidence to the web, where the science and technology of tracking actual readers through the content is so much more advanced.)

More to the point, as Jack Shafer makes clear in his excellent piece today about the strange maneuvers of Philip Anschutz, the only thing that is really outdated about newspapers today, in a concrete business sense, is the margins in which they continue to operate. Thirty percent is typical at a strong metropolitan daily! Those are numbers anyone in the media buisness, outside of television, would die for.

We’re not sure we agree with Shafer’s assertion that these healthy margins are due to “harvesting market strength” in the short term— but then we live in a city with one of those exceptional dailies that has actually managed to sustain growth in circulation. The other thing that is exceptional about the Twin Cities is that Kinght-Ridder—the bedraggled bridesmaid here—is everywhere else considered forward-thinking, whereas here the Pi-Press’s website is one of the most shamefully useless sites on the web, which comports well with the generally cadaverous scent of the whole operation down on Cedar Street.

No, newspapers will stick around just as long as TV, radio, and the web stick around, but they will continue to evolve—some for the better, some for the worse, many for free…. but all somewhat independently of whether the reading (listening, browsing) public thinks there is any value in them.