Streamline Training & Documentation: 21st-Century Journalism II: Concentrating on Quality

Wednesday, June 07, 2006

21st-Century Journalism II: Concentrating on Quality

Warren Buffett's recent comments on the long-term prospects for the newspaper industry have been widely reported:

Newspapers face the prospect of seeing their earnings erode indefinitely. It’s unlikely that at most papers, circulation or ad pages will be larger in five years than they are now. That’s even true in cities that are growing.

But most owners don’t yet see this protracted decline for what it is. ... Certain newspaper executives are going out and investing on other newspapers. I don’t see it. It’s hard to make money buying a business that’s in permanent decline. If anything, the decline is accelerating. Newspaper readers are heading into the cemetery, while newspaper non-readers are just getting out of college. The old virtuous circle, where big readership draws a lot of ads, which in turn draw more readers, has broken down.

What has been interesting to me is to see the response to Buffett in certain knowledgeable quarters, such as Advertising Age. We're talking here about players who have business reasons to aim to be clear-eyed in their assessment of trends in the media. The Advertising Age article reports:

"Broadcast media always had the advantage, because they could communicate instantaneously to a national marketplace," said David Teitler, DotConnect's president and a newspaper-network fantasist since the mid-1990s, when he worked on the problem at the National Newspaper Network, the industry trade group. "Yet people trust newspapers. That's newspapers' killer app. Everyone from Procter to GM wants to get local, because that's where the sales take place."

In my view, a crucial word in Teitler's statement is "trust." After a period of feeling obliged to pander to readers and prospective readers in a desperate effort to at least maintain circulation, the smartest newspapers are recognizing that pandering devalues their content's strongest feature, namely the confidence readers have in its accuracy and astuteness. In this regard, the blogosphere has been a godsend because its fact-checking zeal has concentrated minds at the traditional media.

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Labels: Journalism

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