The experience of news as we knew it: a personal perspective

[scarlettina]

People who don't live in Seattle may only just now be hearing about the demise of one of the city's two local daily newspapers, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. It's the lede in the New York Times' coverage of the decline of newspapers in general. I've been following the news partly because my brother is in the business (he does event marketing for Newsday). He tells me that he still has a job--for now. But I digress. The direction in which news is going in Seattle is a little alarming. Just ask varina8, the professional journalist, and she'll give you an earful.

I remember reading Newsday every single day, growing up on Long Island. As a kid, I didn't read much hard news, but all of the stuff in Part II--a combination of Living, Style, and Entertainment--was must-read stuff for me. (I didn't go a day, growing up, without Peanuts, B.C., Ziggy, and Ann Landers.) I came to hard news later, living in NYC and reading The New York Times every day with some Newsday on the side.

When I moved to Seattle, I was astonished to find that the local papers didn't really cover national news much. It seemed a little Mickey Mouse to me. And the locals I met early on disparaged both the Seattle Times (a shill for conservatives) and the P-I (referred to by some as the Seattle Public Insult). All of this lead me to continue using the NYT as my primary news source, with smatterings of news from The Stranger (one of our two local weeklies--the reporting is occasionally excellent but, with a few notable exceptions, often unreliable due to bias). It's only been the last five years that I've really started paying attention to the Times and the P-I. True, the Times is more conservative than the P-I, but each offers value and together they make a pretty good source for local news.

And now we're losing the P-I. The idea that the city will have only one local news source in print--and that, we're told, will rely mostly on AP reports and news from other aggregators as well--is just bizarre to me. It's alien in the way that being in a foreign country and stumbling onto some completely new and ferociously unappealing custom is alien. It flies in the face of everything I've ever learned or thought about monopoly and competition in the marketplace, the value of multiple viewpoints, the value of local news and more. And if the Times does rely on aggregators, then our only mainstream source of local news will be broadcast, The Stranger, and the Seattle Weekly, which I stopped reading quite some time ago--which should make things, um, interesting. I think it's a bad idea.

Now, I totally admit that I haven't done much of anything to support my local papers. I only read the paper versions occasionally. I've become much more dependent on the Web for getting my news. My bad. But there's the part of me that grew up on newspapers, commuted to work with newspapers and then had to wash my hands when I got to the office because they were so dusted and darkened with ink, that just rebels against the idea of losing newspapers altogether. For me, a lot of this--I admit--is as much about losing the experience of reading a newspaper as it is about the value of multiple news sources, the importance of local reporting and so on. It was a piece of growing up that I'm sorry to see diminish and that I fear disappearing. But times, they are a-changin', it's been coming for a while, and I've adapted to new media with nary a thought to what it's replacing.

Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone?

Comments

[davidlevine]

After decades of reading the paper every single morning, we dropped the Oregonian last year because our local delivery people did a piss-poor job (delivering while we were on vacation, failing to start again after vacations, and some days just not delivering at all) and because they keep trying to turn the paper into something that's less useful for us (scaling back TV listings, comics, and editorials). I'm sorry to see the papers hurting but they are not responding well to the changing landscape.

[jaynefury.livejournal.com]

This is the tragedy of newspapers in a digital world. We've been living with AP source news in Tacoma for quite some time. We have a few local columnists still, which makes it the only reason we still subscribe.

[ckd]

The Boston Globe, which used to be just below the national papers, is sliding downhill pretty fast as well. That'd leave us with the tabloid (both in format and in editorial style) Boston Herald as the primary newspaper here.

I'm personally surprised that the P-I lasted as long as it did under the JOA.

(Since I grew up in the South Sound, we also read the News Tribune; IMO, it had better Mariners coverage than either of the Seattle papers anyway.)

[dancinghorse.livejournal.com]

I'm hoping that people to band together in the areas that are losing their papers and come up with an alternative, probably online. We've lost one of our papers, too, the more conservative one, but the Star is hanging on. It has one of the best newspaper websites in the country, and made a decision last year to focus on local news. They'll probably have to start charging for the site if advertising revenue keeps dropping, but I'd pay to keep them alive. They do good work.

[scarlettina.livejournal.com]

The problem with charging for the site is that people will go elsewhere for their news, where they don't have to pay for it--local blogs and things like that. The New York Times tried this with their columnists a couple of years ago and the experiment failed miserably. I know it's something that other papers are considering experimenting with but, well, see above re: going to other, free sites. It's really a problem

[dancinghorse.livejournal.com]

The NY Times did it badly and overcharged, and it was happening in a different psychological environment. I think if people band together to protect their local news, they may agree to help pay for it. Part of the new(er) economy.

There has to be a different model for local news, and I think one will emerge as the traditional models collapse. Something will fill the vacuum. Even if it's local blogs--won't those want to get together into blogrings and webrings, and then they'll need to fund their operations somehow, and then...?

[steve98052.livejournal.com]

A pay model that might work would be some sort of micro-payment thing. Suppose a trusted major outlet (probably meaning the New York Times, the Washington Post Company, or the AP) signed up a few hundred newspapers (whether or not they still have print editions) into an online news co-op, and charged $10 a month, $50 a year, or whatever worked.

Then one could read as much as one liked from any of the few hundred papers, and the co-op apportioned the subscription fee among the papers by some agreed-upon formula. Maybe each page-view counts as a use of the co-op service, with a system to keep papers from running up the count by putting very few words on each page.

Then for each month, each subscriber's payment is divided by that subscriber's total number of uses for the month, and the payments are distributed proportionally to member papers. If I pay $10 and read 1000 articles, each use generates a one cent use payment, but if I only read ten articles each use generates a one dollar use payment.

Even sites that serve the same news – even indiscriminate wire service aggregation sites – could draw lots of page views with quick server response and easy-to-read (low ads) pages. Sites with local content could draw page views from their own areas.

The main impediments to such a plan are mutual distrust between competitors and (maybe) anti-trust. But if enough good news outlets banded together like that they might be able to sell a worthwhile number of subscriptions, because one might have trouble finding quality reporting by going elsewhere.

[willowgreen.livejournal.com]

I still get both the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News, but they've both shrunk so much in the past couple of years that their combined weight is less than what one daily paper used to be. The Merc is a pathetic excuse for a newspaper, with a huge percentage of its articles coming from wire services and other newspapers, but it's my only source for local news. The Chronicle offers better writing and a genuine point of view, but the Hearst Corporation has announced its intention to cut it even further and then sell it or shut it down. Which would make San Francisco essentially a no-newspaper town, since the Examiner was sold off years ago to a small family business that has given it the professional luster of a middle school newsletter.

Can you tell I'm grinding my teeth as I write this? I learned to write working on the youth page of my local newspaper when I was still in junior high. And even though I realized in college that newspaper journalism wasn't for me, I'm still nostalgic for the smell of paste-up wax. I know the rise of Internet news has changed things irrevocably for the people who depend on newspapers to actually make money. But sometimes it seems as if the owners are doing their best to kill the papers off without any help at all.

[scarlettina.livejournal.com]

Regarding your very last sentence, that's often the way it looks to me, too. And I just don't get it.

[katatomic.livejournal.com]

In the case of the P-I that's exactly what was happening. Hearst gutted it once subscription numbers swayed in the 1980s. They never gave equal advertising money to the P-I as they had claimed they would and they never supported the paper after the JOA, but rather put the Times into direct competition with the P-I by making a morning edition of the Times. What was done to the SF papers under their JOA is the same thing that was done to the P-I/Times by the same corporation. Hearst hates competition, even when they own it.

The thing that really makes me sad is that the P-I predates the Seattle Times by 40 years; it's our original paper and seeing it go down with such a sad little whimper hurts the history-buff in me as well as the former journalist.

Here's the real irony of the death of the P-I, though: Hearst has owned both papers since 1921, but it bought the P-I first. The Times was the progressive paper originally. Once Hearst bought out the Times, it became the conservative paper and the P-I became the progressive paper. The JOA of the 1970s was actually the beginning of the end for the P-I, not its salvation as hoped. A rash of high-profile prizes saved the P-I from going down a long time ago.

[e-bourne.livejournal.com]

Hearst does not own the Seattle Times. The Seattle Times is privately owned by the Blethen Family, which owns a small chain of newspapers, many of them on the east coast. The Blethen family did their share by using profits from the Times to support their east coast papers, particularly the purchase of a small paper in Maine, where the family is originally from.

I am truly and deeply sad that the P-I is going down. I fought to keep it going, and to keep the JOA viable. It makes me sad to see it go under.

[steve98052.livejournal.com]

As e_bourne wrote, the Blethen family owns the Seattle Times. Some years ago, they spent a few hundred million dollars buying a chain of small newspapers; they're now probably worth about $30M, and the debt service is bleeding them. As a result, the Times is probably doomed too, even though its operating losses are pretty small. With the subscriptions they'll pick up when the P-I stops printing, they might have a chance to operate at a profit. But there's no chance that their operating profits will ad up to an overall profit; loan payments are going to kill them.

Source: I'm paraphrasing an NPR story from memory. Their journalism is probably better than my memory.

[willowgreen.livejournal.com]

Did you ever see this "Reduction In Force" photo essay on Flickr, by a San Jose Mercury News photographer?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hellvetica/sets/72157604470612285/

It's kind of chilling.

[varina8.livejournal.com]

Sad to hear about the decline of the Merc. At one time, it had a strong reputation for investigative journalism.

[textualdeviance.livejournal.com]

The papers that are still surviving and thriving are the ones that managed to give their readers something unique that they couldn't find anywhere else, and also managed to give it to them instantly and digitally.

When you can get the exact same wire or syndicated content in multiple forms, what's the point of reading a specific paper?

What's depressing to me is that, in their steadfast refusal to adapt to changing technology, Luddite journalists are robbing the public. Journalists refused to use the Web until it was too late, and now there is little to no actual journalism there at all. They kept scoffing and dragging their heels, and characterizing digital information delivery as kids' stuff and somehow beneath them, and only hopped on when it became too powerful to ignore. By which time citizen media sources--largely untrained and ignorant of how real journalism works--had already taken over.

I decided to go back to school and get my j degree in part because I wanted to help reform the business itself. I wanted it to get away from the punditry-with-ads that it had become since the corporate takeovers and consolidated ownership of the '80s. It's definitely depressing to me that the collapse of local newspapers means it's going to be harder for me to find a real journalism job, and I hope that journalism itself isn't dying, as it appears to be.

[scarlettina.livejournal.com]

Seems to me that it's time for you to start that local news blog. :-)

[textualdeviance.livejournal.com]

Actually, I'd love to see all the former PI staff get together and form an online local news co-op of some sort.

Real reporting and editing are rapidly becoming lost arts, which scares the hell out of me.

[steve98052.livejournal.com]

I don't believe it's Luddite attitudes that have killed newspapers. They've tried all sorts of things to make money in a changing landscape. Craigslist and Monster.com have swallowed their real business, which is selling advertising space. They aren't doing nearly as bad at selling subscriptions. The P-I apparently makes a profit from their web presence, but it's not enough to cover losses printing the paper and running a full-service news room.

[oldmangrumpus.livejournal.com]

I've had a Seattle Times subscription since I moved here in 1987 (full disclosure - it was for the comics), but I more often read the P-I - online. And the Times is becoming the Incredible Shrinking Newspaper; everyday it gets smaller and smaller. Seems their big campaign to destroy the P-I finally worked, but it was a Pyrrhic victory.

[herself_nyc]

Oh yes, I share your pain.
I realized I'd stopped buying the paper NY Times entirely a few years ago; I just read it on line. I was one of the handful of saps they actually got to pay for the online access to the columnists, etc, before they abolished that. But I too wonder how investigative journalism and foreign desks can be maintained when news is now essentially being given away for free.

[mysticalforest.livejournal.com]

I'm not in the slightest surprised. They're inferior products.

When we first moved into our condo we got a free trial subscription to the Seattle Times and then we got the same thing when we got our house. Each time it was a profoundly negative experience.

Aside from making my fingers filthy which I hate, there's the irrelevance. I only ever read one or two stories at most, making how much of a percentage of the rest of the paper a complete waste of time? The local things were things I wasn't interested in (not living actually in Seattle proper) and the national news were things I'd already heard about elsewhere. It's hyperbole to say I spent more time washing and drying my hands after handling the paper than I did actually reading it, but not by much.

I remember I thought the proper thing to do would be to use the websites instead. No ink, right? Unfortunately, at the time, both of their websites were just horrible. I can't remember which was which, but one had a dramatically ugly interface that made me to not want to go there ever ever and the other had a search engine that sucked so poorly I'm surprised it could find the word Seattle.

So I abandoned both local newspapers in toto. Clearly, these were two publications that did not want to compete in an open market.

I accidentally found out about NWCN when I was channel surfing and went to their website and it had interesting stories, an interface that while not world class at least didn't poke me in the eye and was, gasp, searchable. And it turned out their email bulletins for breaking stories—both national and local—broke (still break) faster than any other news organization I've seen for both national and local news—including the Seattle Times for Seattle-related stories.

I still subscribe to the Seattle Times email bulletin just in case, but really there's no point. Half the stories are about sports (sports is not news) and the other half break well after both NWCN and CNN for national news.

Take the fact that Seattle's police chief is the new drug czar. How'd I learn about that? NWCN news bulletin which included a sentence about the fellow, then from CNN which included a sentence about the fellow, then—nearly an hour after that#151;Seattle Times email bulletin which said nothing other than Chief [insert name I forgot] might become drug czar. Full stop.

Awesome work, guys. Waiting longer than anyone else for less information. Top quality.

And I recently (month or so ago?) subscribed to both ST's and the PI's Twitter feeds. ST's is actually pathetic, updating almost never, which I find kinda incalcuably silly since, I thought, news happens all the time, like when people are alive and not zombies. But even zombies would be up to something. The PI feed is good in that it's actually updated, but it's updated in big clots with five or six stories at a time, which is bad Twitter behavior.

Incidentally, the best Twitter feed for news I've found so far is BreakingNewsON (http://twitter.com/BreakingNewsOn), which in its quest to be first is the first to blurt out the very first thought in its head and then add detail later, so you're likely to get five tweets for one story over an hour. But, if you can stand that and story corrections as it unfolds, they have broad coverage of international news and events that far surpasses anyone else's feed, including CNN's. I learn things not only first but they're often the only feed that mentions things at all, particularly international events.

Wow, what a tirade.

The two papers lost for good reason: They're simply inferior compared to any other possible outlet for any kind of news or entertainment they cover.

[textualdeviance.livejournal.com]

For the most part, I definitely agree with you, though I will say that broadcast is inherently inferior to print (whether that's pixels or picas) because it doesn't have nearly the same available space and time in which to tell in-depth stories. Also, broadcast reporters don't usually have nearly the same level of journalism education that print reporters do. (Especially the most recent generations. They're all trying to be Nancy Grace instead of Edward R. Murrow.)

I was interning at the Kitsap Sun in the summer of 2006, when they decided to rebook (change the order of the sections) their paper, and lead with local news instead of national/international.

I thought at the time that that was a brilliant idea. They knew that their readers were undoubtedly getting broader-scale news from other sources, and that their much-smaller paper was in no way going to be able to compete on that level. So they revised their focus to be on items of local interest to their specific readership--going in-depth on Kitsap County news in a way that no one else was.

Unfortunately, their haphazard (at the time) embrace of Web tech still put them behind, but I still think they did the right thing in terms of editorial decisions. (And it's a darn shame my living situation doesn't allow me to work there, because I'd go back in a heartbeat. Damn good people there.)

It's a shame that so little of that is happening elsewhere. Everyone else is trying to be the WaPo or LA Times or something, instead of just stripping down and doing what their reporters do best: What's happening HERE.

[mysticalforest.livejournal.com]

I should clarify: I don't watch any broadcast source for news for the reasons you state. Also, by the time they air the story's already old. I suppose the closest would be The Daily Show and The Colbert Report but that's only because news stories leak into their skits.

For NWCN, I just use their email bulletins and accompanying print (well, web) stories.

[textualdeviance.livejournal.com]

Makes sense. And yes, they are a unique resource, which I think is great.

[kateelliott.livejournal.com]

I have always subscribed to the newspaper; it's kind of a tradition for me. I'm watching the Honolulu Advertiser shrink markedly over the last 3 months as they figure out ways to save $$. I still value their local coverage (plus the all important surf report!), but I wonder how long they can keep up in this market and economy.

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

I've subscribed to a local paper ever since I had money to call my own. I went with the Times rather than the PI; I think I made my choice on the basis of the comics the two papers carried back in 1981 or 1982, and just stuck with it since then. I've subscribed to the Sunday New York Times for much of that time as well, along with sporadic attempts at the daily Times and a few years of the Wall Street Journal back when I was a banker. (I was apparently the only person at First Interstate Bank of Washington who ever subecribed to the Wall Street Journal privately. Someone from the mailroom came and asked me about it when the paper started arriving, wondering how I'd been authorized to get it since I wasn't a vice president. I think it made me a considerably better forecaster than I would have been without it.)

I'll miss the newspapers when they go. I haven't learned to read them online yet. I'll miss noticing stuff I'm not looking for just because it's on the same big page with stuff I want to know about.

[e-bourne.livejournal.com]

I'm deeply said to see the P-I go, although I understand that they will be keeping an online presence. I don't know what that will be worth. I worked on the last arbitration, so there's a lot I -can't- say. What I can say is that this will hurt both papers. No one will come out a winner. Not Hearst, Not the Blethens, certainly not anyone who works at either paper, and definitely not the people who live in Seattle.

We cancelled our subscription to the P-I a few weeks ago. When I heard the news, I told M it was our fault. We should have held on a little longer. :-/

When we moved to Seattle, we were originally excited that there were two papers. We tried them out. We thought, whoa, The Oregoninan, it was awesome! But hey, you have to have a local paper. Soon, no one will have a local paper.

Not to be punny, but the times, they are a-changing. It's not just newspapers.

[varina8.livejournal.com]

Seattle's loss will not be in the big national stories, but rather in the local items that help generate participation in a city's civic life — changes in land use codes, city budgets, and that type of unsexy news.

Some local blogs (Capitol Hill (http://www.capitolhillseattle.com/), Phinneywood (http://www.phinneywood.com/), Ballard (http://www.myballard.com/)) are already trying to fill the gap. The Stranger has the staff and the clout to move into the gap, but for me, it would take some effort to build up its credibility (a few too many Borat-like features have left me suspicious). Crosscut (http://crosscut.com/) might also help fill the gap, but the bulk of their current coverage is pretty stodgy.

[steve98052.livejournal.com]

The Stranger has facetiously called itself Seattle's only newspaper. Soon enough that might be true.