Ken Auletta - Googled - The End of the World as We Know It

For the past decade, most other newspaper publishers have proclaimed that one answer to their woes was to offer readers more local news coverage, yet too few invested in local newspapers. Even fewer newspapers vied to make their Web sites innovative.

The Internet democratizes knowledge, allowing us to fetch information from most newspapers, magazines, or books anywhere in the world. It provides choices. It is convenient; Google aggregates information so that it’s easy to access. It spreads newspaper stories all over the Web, multiplying the readership. It opens lines of communication to bloggers and readers with valuable information and provocative opinions. And it generates some advertising revenue. But it robs actual newspapers of readers, reduces newspaper advertising and circulation revenue, and makes information in the New York Times equal to information from anywhere. Digital news has another side effect: it allows newspaper owners to quantify which stories appeal to their readers. As Larry Page lamented, “The kinds of stories that generate page views”-a Britney Spears meltdown or a Jessica Simpon weight gain-“are not the kinds of stories reporters want to write,” or that he personally wants to read, “and that kind of makes it worse.”

We are racing through a revolution comparable to the one ushered in by Herr Gutenberg’s printing press in the fifteenth Century. The outcome is as unclear today as it was then. “During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points,” NYU professor Clay Shirky wrote on his blog. He continued:

The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment… When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution… They are demanding to be told that the ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to… We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it… Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.

Shirky is correct, I believe, that it’s vital to preserve journalism, but wrong about the unimportance of newspapers. By newspapers I don’t necessarily mean the printed papers we are accustomed to. I mean a product that offers readers a variety of news, including news they didn’t expect they would want or need. Maybe it’s a book review, or a recipe, or a description of pension padding by public workers, or the bonuses paid to investment bankers whose institution has received a federal bailout. Maybe it’s a report on the appointment of a finance minister in a country that’s going to be vital next year. A good online or print newspaper should be like a supermarket, with a variety of choices. No one is forcing readers to pull items down from shelves. But they ought to have available to them all the information they need to be well-rounded, informed citizens of a democracy Even a not very good newspaper-and most are not very good-broadens the horizons of its readers.

By newspapers, I also mean something often neglected by those who have a better understanding of technology than of journalism. While good journalism can be practiced by individuals-think Upton Sinclair or I. F. Stone-it is often a collaborative effort, the result of teamwork rather than solitary labor. Story ideas are kicked around in a newsroom. A journalist reports a story and phones the editor, who makes suggestions and prods the reporter to probe various angles and seek different interviews. When the story is completed it is transmitted to the editor, who usually asks: “Are you sure about this fact? Who’s your source for this anonymous quote? Have you got a second source on that? There was a report in X newspaper that drew the opposite conclusion. You buried your lede-the heart of your story is in paragraph ten. Did you talk to Y? This story needs more context.” On a big story, other editors will weigh in. This is not meant to disparage bloggers or other independent voices or experts. It is meant to say that the offhand dismissal of journalistic organizations-which is a cousin of the belief that a computer can assemble news without editors-will diminish the thoughtful journalism a democracy requires.

I asked Marc Andreessen, as I did others, to make believe he was the publisher of a newspaper. “What would you do?” The answer he shot back at me was a common one: “Sell it!” The problem with this strategy, as the Rocky Mountain News and other papers have discovered, is that there are no buyers. And those wealthy buyers who might be tempted to splurge for a newspaper trophy, the way their peers buy sports teams, risk looking like fools, not saviors, like Sam Zell at the now bankrupt Tribune Company.

Pressed further, Andreessen said he’d rush to put the newspaper online and move away from the print edition, as a handful of papers have already done. There are at least two vulnerabilities to this approach, as Andreessen recognized. First, because online newspaper ads today generate no more than 10 percent of what a print ad does, the paper really would be, as Mel Karmazin said, trading dollars for digital dimes. Second, public corporations are dependent on investors, and not many folks will invest in a declining asset. So the market value of newspapers will continue to fall, depriving them of the capital to invest in reporting and, in too many cases, the money to meet debt obligations. It may be true, as Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation’s newspaper retreat concluded, that in another ten years online news will generate enough income to save the paper. The quandary is how to get through the next ten years. As Murdoch conceded, more than a few papers “will disappear,” either consolidating with others or collapsing. Some of these newspapers are mediocre outposts of former monopolies and will not be mourned. But many are valuable civic institutions that cannot easily be replicated.

Any number of ideas have been advanced to rescue newspapers and journalism. Newspapers are belatedly striving to make online editions more interactive and to better conform to a Web sensibility. Michael Hirschorn wrote a provocative media column for The Atlantic Monthly and took a stab at defining a Web sensibility. He wrote that newspapers should take some of their star reporters-he mentions Kelefa Sanneh, the pop music critic for the Times, and Dana Priest, the national security reporter for the Washington Post-and encourage them to create “an interactive online universe,” inviting others to share their information, views, or news tips. “Gaming this out in the most baldly capitalistic fashion,” he wrote, “the papers then stand a chance of transforming one Sanneh review (one impression) into the organic back-and-forth of social media (1,000 impressions).”

Newspapers are also experimenting with reducing costs by outsourcing functions to online ventures-investigative reporting to former Wall Street Journal managing editor Paul Steiger’s foundation-funded ProPublica; or international reporting to GlobalPost, a privately financed organization whose news operation is supervised by former Boston Globe foreign correspondent Charles Sennott, and which pays seventy correspondents in fifty-three countries one thousand dollars for four dispatches a month and gives them part ownership of the enterprise. Bloomberg has proposed that newspapers could outsource their business coverage to them; dozens of newspapers have ceded much of their national political and government coverage to the hundred reporters who work for Politico. Another form of outsourcing is for papers to share articles and photographs; this approach is being tried by a consortium of the New York Daily News, Buffalo News, Times Union of Albany, and New Jersey ’s Star-Ledger and The Record. It has also been proposed that newspapers could be saved by acts of philanthropic generosity similar to the Poynter Institute’s ownership of the St. Petersburg Times; or by injecting new revenues into newspapers (Yahoo has had some success in selling ads for a group of about eight hundred newspapers); or by various governmental actions, from relaxing regulations to tax breaks to advertising subsidies (as France did starting in early 2009) to-a really bad idea-direct subsidies.