Black, white and dead all over

Forty years ago, a newspaper was one of the most lucrative businesses to own. What has happened the last year, and will happen next year, is something that should stun any reader.

When I started college, my initial major was computer engineering. It wasn’t because I liked systems or had any desire to design them—it was because I liked video games and had a wild idea that I would make them. Of course, school teaches more about the study of computer programming than how to actually do it … but that’s another topic.

Even in 2000 it was obvious the IT jobs were doomed to shift to India. Sure, there are still people working in the IT field in the US, but they are a shrinking population.

I changed to journalism because it was a job that could not be outsourced.

Or so I thought.

Bad tidings

Four years ago, Reuters turned heads when it sacked many of its writers and shipped their jobs to India. Many of their remaining writers considered a strike—reporters stick together that way.

Reuters’ Indian reporters were assigned to do what we in the industry would call “phoners.” A phoner is a 150-300 word story usually spawned by a corporate press release. A hospital is adding a new wing. You hand your new staff reporter the press release. He thinks up a couple questions, makes a couple phone calls and zaps it off within a couple hours.

While it is not hard-hitting journalism, the phoner has been how new hires cut their teeth. The phoner gives editors a chance to train new recruits and gives those recruits a chance to build up contacts.

Apparently the Reuters model worked, because last year Pasadena Now fired its entire non-editorial staff and moved all their jobs to India. Ordinarily, a freelancer earns between 20 to 30 cents per word: the Indian reporters earn $7.50 for each 1,000 words—less than a cent a word.

The Orange County Register followed suit in June.

This outsourcing would be unremarkable were it happening in any other industry. The reality is that news is, or should be, much more than the phoner.

Newspaper Death Watch is a fine blog that is chronicling the absolute collapse of one of the only businesses named in the US constitution.

So far, the list of casualties includes the Kentucky Post, Cincinnati Post, King County Journal, Union City Register-Tribune, Capital Times, Halifax Daily News, San Juan Star and others. With their parent company Tribune in chapter 11 bankruptcy, the LA Times and Chicago Tribune look set to head the way of the mastodon—the Miami Herald is not far behind.

The Detroit Free Press announced recently that come spring it will slash production to three days a week to focus on its Web edition. The former Kentucky Post is also slated to be reinvented as a Web-only news medium.

The Web is great, but it has one major flaw: it is international.

Another cost of globalization

I will assume my readers are intelligent and do not believe newspapers make any money from the price of a newspaper. The price does little more than give newspapers a figure to quote the cops when some disgruntled reader knocks over a news stand. If the papers were marked “Free” then publishers could not claim damages.

That is hardly an unlikely scenario. Even in college our paper ran some nasty stories about sports coaches. These prompted drunken teams to ransack our distributing stands and destroy the week’s issue. And that was just the damage caused by drunken jocks.

No, money comes from ads. In a local newspaper, much of the money comes from selling local ads. It’s how local real estate agents and auto garages make themselves known. The pack-in ad pages inform buyers about weekly promotions at local stores, and in the current economic pinch those coupons should matter. Tom’s Auto Shop has no reason to advertise in the pages of The New York Post when his garage is Bumblefuck, Idaho.

And here is where the Internet gets to be a problem.

A community newspaper is a local space. Its printed pages reach a limited geographic location. This makes it highly desirable for local businesses trying to attract shoppers who can actually visit their store.

The Internet, however, is a global space. News tickers drive readers from around the world to Web content published by local media outlets. In this space, the major revenue of local advertising is lost. This is why you instead see ads for Ford trucks, networking Web sites, or whichever dumbass ad appears at the top of this article.

The science of the advertising department, which used to promote ad spaced based on the news budget of each page, is lost. When ads are inserted into Web space by a computer, nonsensical match ups are the norm, not the exception.

Here’s a sad story about a girl who lost her arms and legs and “walks” by biting the pavement with her teeth and yanking her torso forward with her neck—buy a CK jacket!

These kinds of ads don’t work, and consequently the purchasers don’t want to pay a lot.

Click ads do not pay the same as print ads. A print ad is sold based on how much space is on a page. A click ad is sold at a “per click” rate based on how often readers click versus how often they gloss over it.

Of course this doesn’t even touch on ad blocking filters like the Firefox AdBlock plugin or more generic Privoxy—a staple of IT workers who spend their days in front of a screen and have the potential to be the most dependable ad viewers.

I have a hard time imagining an online paper whose ad revenue is high enough to pay a full staff of reporters and editors outside Salon.com or PC Magazine–now a Web site–owned by Ziff-Davis.

Who’s left to report?

There were 15,000 job losses this year, and many more if you add up the last three years. Many US newsrooms look like ghost towns. Entire departments have shut down and news floors operate with over half their cubicles empty. Content has fallen to wire filler, and features—when they exist—are nonsense, non-local packaged fluff.

The drop in employed reporters means a drop in coverage.

“That’s OK, we always have AP.”

Yes, wire services are fantastic. Since the 1800s they have enabled papers to cover news beyond their scope. But there are problems: AP is not at your city council meeting; AFP is not covering your millage; Reuters does not give a shit about problems in your local school system. They will not waste their limited resources after significant staff cuts to dispatch a reporter to your child’s middle school.

There is nothing in place to fill in when local papers fold, and fold they will—analysts are predicting ad revenue will continue to fall at double-digit rates for the next three years, and many cities in the US will be left entirely without local coverage.

The Oakland Press, for example, thrived because the Detroit Free Press dropped every north-Oakland suburb from its coverage range. But if it folds, few papers will cover the goings-on of Holly, Lake Orion, Pontiac, Auburn Hills or Oxford. Waterford still has The Spinal Column but … yeah.

That spells trouble for news consumers. While it may not be obvious to my readership demographic, local news directly affects the lives of homeowners and parents much more than Washington politics. For 20-something readers, it’s boring. I agree, covering it sucked, but it’s still a valuable service.

Citizen journalists? Where?

I went to the Drudge Report yesterday, since once upon a time Matt Drudge was grudgingly called a citizen journalist by professionals. More often, we said “He thinks he is …” The site was nothing but a list of links to reports by other media outlets.

Essentially, what Drudge does is play editor. He decides the day’s news budget for the Drudge Report and plays those stories.

Free Republic is a bit closer to the mark, but more of its stories still have a lead ending in, “… the New York Times reported.”

And blogs? Don’t make me laugh. News blogs bulk quote out of other media and provide their own commentary on the day’s events. Essentially, the serve as the podium for every asshole who wants to write a column but doesn’t want to put in the years it takes to get the opportunity.

It takes experience to write a good column—I’ve written enough bad columns to know.

These citizen journalists are, at best, rehashing the work of paid reporters. When possible, they stitch together multiple sources with a few new facts and call it brilliance. But when there are no professional local reporters left to break stories, where will they find inspiration for their material—or more importantly find material to copy?

I don’t have an answer, but journalism is an industry very much in trouble. The media landscape of 2015 will look shockingly different from the media landscape of today.

I just hope someone is around to write about it whenever we get there.