Peter Kann, the guy who ran the Wall Street Journal before Rupert Murdoch bought it, wrote an op-ed for the paper last weekend entitled "Quality Reporting Doesn't Come Cheap." It reads like an obituary about a suicide.
I know it's easy to be somewhat snarky about the plight of newspapers.
- It's an archaic medium that has been rendered redundant and irrelevant by the ease, speed, volume, and two-wayness of communications online
- It turns out that we never really needed newspapers. Ink on paper was just a bottleneck and an imperfect, biased aggregator. Objective truth was a mirage
I disagree, as does Kann, and his op-ed traces how the seeds of his industry's demise predated the Internet, going back to when the promise of ever-greater ad dollars first encouraged expanded circulation at the cost of reportorial quality. Papers chose to deliver (and looking like) entertainment over substance long before web designers showed them how it's done. It was less important why readers might pay for it, and far more important that those eyeballs were worth something to advertisers.
Then, all the psychobabble broke loose, thanks to the Internet pundits and experts who
- Didn't know what they were talking about, and/or
- Had a vested interest in selling themselves or their services
According to Kann, it was enough to convince newspapers that content had no intrinsic value, and to aggressively give it away on the Internet. Sure, any number of thought-provoking blog posts and slide presentations affirmed this decision, but none of them offered tangible descriptions of a business model that supported it. Newspapers decided to give away their product for free, and then were surprised that it didn't make them any money.
The single, all-pervasive answer was (and is) that dialectic of the Internet, and a metaphor that includes and changes everything, while taking responsibility for absolutely nothing. If you risk stepping out of the new media fishbowl for a nanosecond, you can see the frailty of this thinking.
I've written a lot about the issues of information credibility and authenticity, and the impact of balkanized communities (and variable definitions of "truth") on society and, by association, the efforts of marketers. I'm convinced that the crisis facing public institutions -- whether entities like financial firms, or processes, like elections -- arise from the loss of objective certitude that mechanisms like newspaper reporting used to provide.
No amount of witty blogging or length lists of Twitter followers can replace it; arguing that it's just novel or different is to miss the broader point: new media as resource for fact is nowhere near as good or useful to society, and relying on ads to pay for it only further extends the degradation of content that destroyed the newspaper model in the first place.
Newsprint isn't the problem, nor is the frequency of publication or the delivery mechanisms. Newspapers live and die because of content, and I think Kann believes that quality reporting is worth something.
So do I.
Link to original post