How quickly it all happened: five years ago, and certainly ten, the idea that the daily newspaper would no longer be part of our morning routine would have seemed unthinkable to the majority of Americans. And yet, in retrospect, it was inevitable: the speed and versatility of the internet, plus its inter-activity, made the daily newspaper obsolete, racheted up the speed of news to near the speed of light and put a premium on old-fashioned journalistic virtues that had gotten lost in the “professionalization” of journalism during the latter half of the 20th century.
More about that in a moment, but first this breaking news from the Wall Street Journal:
The Internet is poised to overtake newspapers as the second-largest U.S. advertising medium by revenue behind television, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Global Entertainment and Media Outlook for 2010 to 2014.
The online ad business, excluding mobile ads, is set to expand to $34.4 billion in 2014 from $24.2 billion in 2009, according to the report, which PwC plans to release Tuesday.
Newspapers, meanwhile, continue to suffer from a decline in advertising revenue. According to numbers released by the Newspaper Association of America earlier this year, print advertising revenue dropped 28.6% in 2009 to $24.82 billion. The PwC report estimates that print advertising in newspapers will hit $22.3 billion by 2014.
The drop in ad revenue is not the disease that’s killing newspapers, even though it might look that way. Rather, it’s just a symptom of the larger decline. There was nothing wrong with the daily newspaper, either as a delivery system or a business model — indeed local newspapers are still profitable and most likely will stay that way.
The problem came, oddly, with precisely the thing the news business had worked so hard to achieve — a neutral, “objective” view of the news, professionally edited and then presented in a catholic package that included news both foreign and domestic, local news, sports, the weather, features, the “women’s pages,” reviews, horoscopes, comics, etc. There was no particular reason for this collection of themes and topics, but that’s how it evolved and that’s what people got used to.
The internet changed all that. Just as mono gave way to stereo and analog gave way to digital, the newspaper that used to land on your front door is now the newsfeed being delivered to you — free! — in cyberspace.
“Although the Internet did not fully escape the impact of the recession, its decline in the United States was much less severe than that of other advertising media,” the PwC report notes.
Shifts in consumer behavior, potential for inventory on the Internet, and increased broadband penetration in the U.S. are key factors in PwC’s projections, according to David Silverman, a partner at PwC.
In the new news medium, there’s no top-down editorial process, no “broad vision” between you and the news you want. Sure, older readers are going to miss the horoscopes and the “Peanuts” cartoons and a few dead-enders on West End Avenue in Manhattan are going to miss the weekly thud of the massive Sunday New York Times landing outside their co-op doors. But those days are going, going, and soon will be gone — for better and worse.
It’s a brave new world, and while you may think you’re going to miss the good old days of the managing-editor run paper, we’re all going to have to get used to it. It’s a meritocracy that’s a’borning, and whether Gresham’s Law will apply remains to be seen — but the best stories, the best-written stories, the best-illustrated stories and those that most inventively use multimedia and interactivity will garner eyeballs and the dull writing that passes for journalism these days will wither on what’s left of the vine.
But isn’t that what democracy is all about? As reporters moved from the working class to the professional class to the mandarin class, they largely kept their Democrat politics, but turned up their noses at the unwashed masses they used to be a part of. Today’s “journalists” self-identify with the people they cover — and why not? They all went to prep school and the Ivy League together! — in a way that the old reporters would have found both risible and objectionable.
Those old-school ink-stained wretches (in the late Herb Caen’s memorable phrase) would have found the late of “professional journalism” utterly predictable: as the late Abe Rosenthal — perhaps the Times‘s last great managing editor — once memorably said, you can’t cover the circus if you’re sleeping with the elephants.
Unfortunately for the MSM, the circus is packing up and hitting the information superhighway, leaving only the clowns behind.
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