Print journalism is yesterday’s news

Print journalism is yesterday's news
by: Wayne MacPhail

Poor, sad newspapers. Just look at them. For decades they were the mirrors and cultural/political/entertainment hubs of their communities – often damned good ones. Good mirrors because they reflected a true face back on itself: as careworn, flawed or corrupt as that face sometimes was. Good hubs because they could collect, sift and make sense of the gabble and hum that echoes through a hundred main streets and alleys of any town or city. They mattered, they cared and they could gather the majority of their communities around their brave fires.

Then, in the early 90s, the Internet appeared dimly on the horizon. In many newsrooms it was dismissed out-of-hand as having little to do with daily journalism and even less to do with the business of newspapering. Back then, in the early 90s, I ran a research and development lab for Southam Inc., once Canada's largest newspaper chain, now just a newspaper memory.

The lab (called Southam InfoLab and housed in the Hamilton Spectator building) tried to make sense of electronic information and its delivery. We also tried to make sense of why, among our colleagues in the newsroom a floor above the lab, dismissal of the web was turning into distrust, disdain and studied disregard. It was clear by the early 90s that classified advertising, the bread and butter of newspapers, would soon be under attack from a growing number of websites that were starting to fill their dull grey pages with photos and herky jerky postage stamp movies. It was clear that news was bubbling up from the street and onto webpages in new, diverse and powerful ways. It was clear that niches were aggregating and telling their own stories. It was clear that smart young men and women were launching new ventures that were catching fire. Clear to everyone except for the folks who strode the floor just above our heads.

For many of them the web was becoming an infinite source of dark stories. It was where child molesters lurked, black-clad teens learned how to make bombs or cache weapons, pornographers leered and 40 year old men trolled for teenagers. Credit card cons hid behind every transaction. It frightened them and they took out their fears in the stories they told, bereft of real facts, but fueled by their vision of a strange forest where there were ghosts, the tales told themselves and their daily bread turned to bitter dust.

And, they had another monster in the closet. The web arrived at the same time as a suited cloister of MBAs – fresh from downsizing and rationalizing nursing homes, assembly lines and heat pump manufacturers – slid into management roles. They set their myopic lens on spreadsheets that could not register quality, depth, community responsibility or tradition. They were callow men with a self-interest in empty monetization and return on investment. They pulled newspapers in on themselves in a race for returns that would not arrive before the callow men had, themselves, moved on.

And so newspapers missed out. Craigslist, amazon, ebay, yahoo, google and dozens of other web entrepreneurs ate newspapers' lunches in crumbs and slices. Newspapers should have owned the local classifieds. Newspapers should have owned online auctions, local portals, online stores and local search. They should have become the electronic hubs and silicon mirrors of their community. It was their birthright and it was lifted from their inside pockets the way nimble children steal a sleeping tourist's wallet.

That was all years ago. Yet, here we are today and things have changed very little. I was recently at a gathering of union representatives from major newspapers across Ontario. It was sad and sobering. Newspaper owners are watching their circulation pratfall and their advertising revenue flatten. The business is sliding into what Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffet calls a "protracted decline." And so those owners are stinting on serious investment in not only the enterprise journalism that has set them apart in the past, but also on the training, tools or time for their employees to come to terms with the changed landscape they will inhabit in the years ahead.

Many newspapers think that having a pre-screened blog, a few awkward and television-aping videoclips or a couple of podcasts means they are in tune with social media. They are sorely mistaken. Learning to put movies, podcasts and blogs online doesn't put you ahead of the game – it’s barely table stakes. Besides, this isn't a game of skill; it’s a game of attitude.

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