Paul F. Olson

A Journal of Miscellany and Disorder

Because I work for a newspaper, I’m often asked the question. You know the question: What’s going to happen to the newspaper industry? As if I know. As if, at this point, anybody knows. Really, I’m no different than anyone else. I read the stories. I watch the news clips. I hear about the cutbacks and closures. And I wonder where it’s going to end.

This week’s national news coverage of the situation — the death of the Rocky Mountain News and the possibly terminal condition of the San Francisco Chronicle, along with some other depressing tidbits — seemed to bring the discussion to a whole new level, but did nothing to resolve the muddy picture of the future.

My own speculative opinions are barely worth the pixels used to display them, and they might very well change, just as they have already changed a dozen or two times, but as of today, here’s what I think: A year or two ago, even six months ago, a future without newspapers would have been a laughable concept, impossible to contemplate. Now it seems increasingly likely that we’re headed rather swiftly in that direction. That’s not to say all of the organizations behind today’s print media will cease to exist. In fact, I think many will survive and even thrive in some intriguing new ways. But it does seem that the papers we all grew up with, the traditional black-and-white-and-red-all-over printed newspaper, is racing irreversibly toward oblivion.

I can see the signs even from where I sit, in my office at a weekly newspaper that services a town of 3,800 people in a county of barely 9,000. I’m not the publisher. I’m not the money person or the circulation person or the advertising person. I’m just the news guy. But I see it. I see our community’s advertising base shrinking. I see our own column inches of ads drying up. I see our newsstand sales faltering and our subscriber base dwindling at a frightening rate. In fact, I see our subscriber base literally dying. We actually print the proof of it every week. It’s called our obituary page. Each week, we might have anywhere from one to ten obituaries in our paper. I used to tell people that every obituary they saw represented a canceled subscription, but in fact, it’s even worse than that, because many of those grandmas and grandpas purchased gift subscriptions for all of their kids and grandkids. When you do the math, every old-timer who dies might translate to two or three dead subscriptions. Last year, there was a woman who passed away who actually paid for seven subscriptions each year. After the dust had settled, six of those subscriptions were canceled and only one was renewed. Old people die. Young people are rejecting print media at a record rate. How long can you keep going like that?

It’s not as if my bosses have a lot of options, either.

We’ve all heard about the tremendous cuts in the newspaper industry, thousands and thousands of reporting jobs eliminated in the past twelve months. By one estimate, the American newspaper reporting force shrank by a whopping fifteen percent last year. We’ve also heard about other cost-saving measures, including the huge one taken in Detroit, where the Free Press and News have eliminated four days of home delivery. Our paper can’t make those kinds of choices. How do you reduce a staff of four people, two of whom are the owners themselves? How do you cut a newsroom that consists of one person? You can’t trim back on technology when you’re still generating type on ten-year-old computers and literally cutting-and-pasting it onto the page. And you can’t eliminate home delivery when you never had home delivery in the first place.

Looking at the industry as a whole, the most troubling thing I’ve read in the past few months was the summary of a study about where America gets its news. It seems the vast majority of news coverage in this country still originates in newspapers — the papers that nobody is reading or advertising in anymore. We’ve all heard so much about the growing blogosphere and how most people are getting their news online these days. But the information that we’re all reading online tends to be abridged versions of newspaper stories or commentary on those stories. Ditto cable TV news. How many reports on CNN or MSNBC or Fox News still begin with the words, “According to a story in today’s Washington Post (Or New York Times or Chicago Tribune or San Francisco Chronicle)?” It seems, then, that our society still demands that the print media provide its news, even as we’ve taken away the very tools they need to do it.

I really did not intend for this to be so gloomy, but it’s a fairly gloomy situation.

As anyone who has poked around this site at all can tell, I’m a fairly tech-savvy person. I embrace new technology. I use it and get enthused about it. But I also worry about the things we lose along the way.

In the end, I don’t think I really care if America reads the New York Times on newsprint or on their cell phones. If, as I suspect, we’re heading for a day when the dead-tree news media is dead and gone itself, and if those organizations are vibrantly and effectively covering the news online instead, so be it. My fear is for the media outlets that won’t survive that transition, that are being so hamstrung, so crippled, that they cannot make the shift. Some of these organizations are among the very best we have when it comes to deep, detailed, background-based, objective, enterprising, investigative reporting, and I see no good alternatives to having them around and healthy, no blog or news site or cable channel or Twitter poster or anything else coming up behind to take their place.

That is what scares me. It scares me a lot.