The resignation of the LA Times’ publisher in a spat with the paper’s new owner, Tribune Corporation, over how profitable a newspaper should be and to what degree that profit should be attained by cutting its news staff, is probably too bad for the paper at the moment, but it’s a symptom of a very big problem for everyone. Everyone, because even people who don’t care to read the paper have to experience the government that a news-poor world entails.
The traditional business model of a paper newspaper, in which readers’ attention is sold to advertisers by placing the ads next to news on a physical page, is broken. One fracture is a very broad withdrawal of public attention from anything that takes very long or much effort to engage with, from music to books and news; another is the IT-driven transformation of text from a product that can be denied to anyone who doesn’t payfor a physical object to a practically non-excludible public good. Still another is a phenomenon not fully understood, which is the much greater difficulty advertisements have drawing attention on a computer screen than on a paper page, evidenced by the flashing ads that now pop up screaming for attention over content on newspaper web pages. And we may also be seeing an example of “Baumol’s cost disease”, the steady increase of the relative cost of products like expert, competent, writing (music performance, in his example) that can’t take advantage of productivity improvements through technology.
There have always been lousy newspapers and only a few good ones; many of the former are no great loss except for local issues. But the LA Times is a great newspaper, well written and probing, with a wonderful tradition of “print it once and print it all” that has generated long, interesting, expensive stories that can help you understand a complicated issue or situation in one sitting. The usual recipes for providing cultural capital in the face of market failure, like government provision, are non-starters in this case: no-one wants Villaraigosa in this business, nor even a California State Department of Public Information, at least not as a newspaper. Some sort of very mechanistic public subsidy program might help keep ‘papers’ alive, but it won’t make anyone read them.
This is not a problem that will be solved by twiddling some media outlet ownership legislation, nor by any other quick fix, and not solving it is simply not OK, as the last few years of public sector disasters indicate. I have no cheerful summary, nor clever policy recommendation to offer. We’re in a lot of trouble here, and without a map.
Feel free to enjoy the rest of your weekend.
Don’t forget the impact of Craigslist on classifieds, too. That’s been a huge impact.
Shame about the Times, it’s a better paper than the Chronicle, and so I wonder if we’ll be dependent on the Sacta Bee for best California reporting.
Is there evidence of “the much greater difficulty advertisements have drawing attention on a computer screen than on a paper page” other than the flashing ads? I haven’t studied the topic, but I imagine that web advertisers are dissatisfied by click-through rates mainly because it’s easy to collect such statistics for web ads.
What percentage of people turning to a particular newspaper page immediately call a phone number given in an ad on that page? Surely the percentage is much, much smaller than web ad click-through rates, yet people did and still do buy newspaper ads, because that’s not the only measure of the effect of an ad.
Good question about the web ads. I’ve never consciously read one or clicked on one, and I’m pretty sure I at least note some newspaper ads. I think it has something to do with the small window: my whole screen is a third the size of a newspaper page, and the browser window is half of that. What’s the equivalent of a fullpage ad on a newspaper website? a popup that just makes you impatient?
Also good point about the classifieds, and it’s not just Craigslist, but also EBay, which has destroyed classified ads for chattels of almost every kind. I read somewhere that classifieds are the most profitable of all newspaper advertising, very tough on the bottom line to lose them.
And the simultaneous demise of the NYTimes and Wapo leaves an increasing number of people dependent on the web for real news: Thanks, Al Gore.
Lengthy, well-written articles are ideal for magazines where people do read them. Why is a change of venue for information unacceptable?
But the LA Times is a great newspaper, well written and probing, with a wonderful tradition of “print it once and print it all” that has generated long, interesting, expensive stories that can help you understand a complicated issue or situation in one sitting.
I’d love to hear Mickey Kaus’ take on that statement.