The New New New Journalism

In my first year in Journalism school, on the first day of a mandatory print newswriting course taught by a veteran former editor of the Los Angeles Times, I was told two things: “Print, as we have known it, is dead. Whatever words we will salvage from it will be slandered, misused, and turned into pander for the Internet masses.”

An optimist he was not; after all, he was a journalist. However, after witnessing the grand arc Internet journalism has taken in the past three years—from mysterious new medium to taking over the industry one paper at a time—I have come to disagree. Print journalism is not dead; rather, it has taken a blow to its bank account. What critics have predicted over the past few years has proved inaccurate: it is not that less people are reading the news, or transgressing into niche markets, but rather that the new medium was not built with a profit-heavy formula. The challenge we face as journalists is only partly the reinvigoration of the unbiased truth. More than anything, it is to make it a business again.

Five years ago, the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism began compiling annual reports on the state of American journalism, concerning content, audience, and financial issues. The 2007 report was cautionary: while the pace of the evolution had accelerated immensely, audiences were “splintering,” creating new hot button fears like “hyper localism.” Papers across the country were cutting their international correspondents, limiting their world news sections to several columns at most, hoping the boost in local news and higher pop culture content would also boost sales. “The consequences of this narrowing of focus involve more risk than we sense the business has considered,” the 2007 report concluded.

However, by 2008 a shift in focus had occurred to what the report refers to as the “decoupling of news and advertising.” Since its conception, all mediums of the news have depended heavily on advertising to keep them both operational and profitable. For the print industry, classifieds have traditionally been its main filler of ad space. However, with the development of sites like Craigslist, print classifieds have become practically obsolete. Newspapers have struggled to fill this financial void, causing massive budget and staff cuts at papers across the country. As more and more publications attempt to translate into online mediums, the test is to find a method of profitable advertising that won’t lose its audience. As the 2008 report explains,

This more nuanced recognition is also putting into clearer relief what news people see as their basic challenge: somehow they must reinvent their profession and their business model at the same time they are cutting back on their reporting and resources. “It’s like changing the oil in your car while you’re driving down the freeway,” said Howard Weaver, the chief news executive of the McClatchy Company.

The question then becomes: what now? Over the course of the past two years, many online components like the New York Times’ Times Select and sections of the Wall Street Journal online dropped their $50 to $100 annual subscription fees, despite having several hundred thousand paid subscribers. In doing so, industry heads hoped to make up the loss in revenue from subscriptions in increased traffic to the free sites and their advertisers.

The waning sales of traditional print publications have furthered the inevitable full transition to online. Internet news sites are facing struggles of their own, between advertising and audience targeting, but as the medium grows so does the innovation. Within the past year alone, papers like the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times have given in to common web practices like linking to other sites, using blogs to maintain up-to-the-minute stories, and encouraging third-party content. Newspapers’ resistance to incorporate such commonplace web behavior has hindered them as web presences, like the old man trying to speak the young kids’ lingo. It has given way to the boom of the blogosphere and other cumulative news venues like the Drudge Report, as the translation of the print newspaper has found its online versions feeling archaic and stiff.

What this has given way to as well, however, is the loosely applied “citizen journalism.” A risky endeavor when it comes to strict news, citizen journalism has given way to a new era of commentary. Be it personal blogs or blog components of larger sites, the commentary provided has become as integral a part of the online news experience as punditry has to broadcast news.

The most promising format for the future of journalism is online-only news sites like Slate, a digital magazine since 1996, or The Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington’s digital newspaper. Both have adapted to the new formats as others must, accepting the fact that while Slate is technically a daily publication, its content is updated every few hours. New York Magazine practically runs two separate publications, its highly circulated weekly magazine, and its online version composed almost entirely of internet-only content.

These digital formats seem to be faring much better than any print equivalent. Research firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson predicts that online advertising will reach $35 billion by 2011, an average growth of 18 percent between 2006 and 2011. The 2008 report attributes this to several factors:

The market research firm offered two main reasons for the shift in priorities in years ahead. First, it considers online ad rates a bargain relative to television and print, which will help it grow. Second, the capability that online offers advertisers to both track and target audiences will be even more appealing once the industry refines its methods of measuring. If the projections are correct, they carry one other implication. While online advertising may be slowing, it is still growing at a brisk pace, while the competition, newspapers and television, are expected to be basically flat.

While newspapers may be dwindling, a common misconception is that magazines are dying out as well. In a July 2008 New York Times profile of Condé Nast publisher Si Newhouse, editorial director Tom Wallace said Internet publications still have a long way to go “to compete with the way we produce words and images in the magazines.” Similarly, Jonathan Newhouse, head of Condé Nast International, said: “I think sometimes commentators throw around these assumptions about what is happening to the industry, going the way of newspapers, and I don’t believe it.”

Not left completely unscathed, magazines did experience heavy budget and staff cuts in the past several years. However, Newhouse has said that the state of Condé Nast, a good barometer for the industry as a whole, is in a strong enough place after their previous cuts that they can ride out the recent blows to the economy as is. According to the Magazine Publishers of America, the total number of magazine readers in 2007 increased about five percent. Additionally, the average number of magazine issues read per month grew six percent, while the percent of the U.S. adult population that reads magazines remained stable, compared to newspapers losing roughly three percent of its circulation annually.

What is even more promising for the magazine industry is its sustainability against the blog and citizen journalism phenomena. What the latter two forums have created is a constant murmur of commentary, but it is widely accepted to be the commentary of the general public. What has driven magazines since their conception—namely lifestyle magazines, the purse strings of the industry—is that they represent a level of expertise and marketed elitism. What magazines represent in the publishing world, as well as in the mind of the reader, is something entirely different than the daily news, and for this they have some solace toward their future.

While there is undoubtedly reason for anxieties within the industry of journalism, the reality of the challenges it faces are basic. As with any company struggling to appeal to its clientele, publishing must find a new manner of effective advertising to fit the new era of publishing we have transitioned into. In the coming years, publishing itself has the potential to transcend almost entirely to an online format, a transition not to be feared as a collapse of a medium but rather a redesign for the sake of its future. In a time of economic anxiety that has everybody on the edge of their seats, the journalism industry must be willing to accept the sacrifices that growing technology presents and realize the birth of a new era of journalism has just begun.