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Extra! Extra!The future of newspapers.

By Michael Kinsley
Posted Saturday, Jan. 7, 2006, at 12:10 AM ET

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Brand-name content; Rube Goldberg delivery process Click image to expand.

Somewhere in the forest, a tree is cut down. It is loaded onto a giant truck and hauled a vast distance to a factory, where the trees are turned into huge rolls of paper. These rolls are loaded onto another truck and hauled another vast distance to another factory, where the rolls of paper are covered in ink, chopped up, folded, stacked, tied, and loaded onto a third set of trucks, which fan out across cities and regions dropping bundles here and there.

Printing plants no longer have the clickety-clack of linotype machines and bubbling vats of molten lead. The letterpress machines that stamped the ink on the paper have been supplanted by offset presses that transfer it gently. There is computer-controlled this and that. Nevertheless, the process remains highly physical, mechanical, complicated, and noisy. As we live through the second industrial revolution, your daily newspaper remains a tribute to the wonders of the first one.

Meanwhile, back to those bundles. Some of them are opened and the newspapers are put, one-by-one, into plastic bags. Bagged or unbagged, they are loaded onto a fourth set of vehicles—bicycles by legend, usually these days a car or small truck—and flung individually into your bushes or at your cat. Other bundles go to retail establishments. Still other newspapers are locked into attractive metal boxes bolted into the sidewalk. Anyone who is feeling lucky and happens to possess the exact change has a decent shot at obtaining a paper or, for the same price, carting away a dozen.

What happens next is aided by a flat surface, especially on a Sunday near Christmas. The proud owner of up to four or five pounds of paper and ink begins searching for the parts he or she wants. The paper has multiple sections, each of which is either folded into others or wrapped around others according to an ancient formula known only to newspaper publishers and designed to guarantee that no one section can either be found on the first go-through or removed without putting half a dozen other sections into play. Newspaper-industry regulations do not require any particular labeling system for sections, but they do require that if letters are used, the sections cannot be in alphabetical order.

And so, at last, there are two piles of paper: a short one of stuff to read, and a tall one of stuff to throw away. Unfortunately, many people are taking the logic of this process one step further. Instead of buying a paper in order to throw most of it away, they are not buying it in the first place.

Bill Gates says that in technology things that are supposed to happen in less than five years usually take longer than expected, while things that are supposed to happen in more than 10 years usually come sooner than expected. Ten years ago, when I went to work for Microsoft, the newspaper industry was in a panic over something called Sidewalk—a now-forgotten Microsoft project to create Web site entertainment guides for a couple dozen big cities. Newspapers were convinced that Microsoft could and would put them out of business by stealing their ad base. It didn't happen. The collapse of the Internet bubble did happen. And, until very recently, the newspapers got complacent. Some developed good Web sites, some didn't, but most stopped thinking of the Web as an imminent danger.

Ten years later, newspapers are starting to panic again. But merely slobbering after bloggers may not be enough. In 1996, the oldest Americans who grew up with computers and don't even understand my tiresome anecdotes about how people used to resist them ("What's a typewriter, Mike?") were just entering adulthood. Now they are most of the working population, or close to it.

The trouble even an established customer will take to obtain a newspaper continues to shrink, as well. Once, I would drive across town if necessary. Today, I open the front door and if the paper isn't within about 10 feet I retreat to my computer and read it online. Only six months ago, that figure was 20 feet. Extrapolating, they will have to bring it to me in bed by the end of the year and read it to me out loud by the second quarter of 2007.

No one knows how all this will play out. But it is hard to believe that there will be room in the economy for delivering news by the Rube Goldberg process described above. That doesn't mean newspapers are toast. After all, they've got the brand names. You gotta trust something called the "Post-Intelligencer" more than something called "Yahoo!" or "Google," don't you? No, seriously, don't you? OK, how old did you say you are?

And newspapers have got the content. The first time I heard myself called a "content provider," I felt like a guy who'd been hired by the company that makes Tupperware to make sure there was plenty of Jell-O salad. As a rule, anyone who uses the term "content provider" without a smirk needs to consider getting content from someone else.

There is even hope for newspapers in the very absurdity of their current methods of production and distribution. What customers pay for a newspaper doesn't cover the cost of the paper, let alone the attendant folderol. Without these costs, even zero revenue from customers would be a good deal for newspapers, if advertisers go along. Which they might. Maybe. Don't you think? Please?

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Michael Kinsley is a columnist for Time and the founding editor of Slate.
Photograph of copies of the New York Times © JP Laffont/Sygma/Corbis.
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Remarks from the Fray:

Mike is right.

The pros . . .

Very portable (no batteries)
Except in the dark paper is always more readable.
Low "cost of ownership"
The integrity of "non-volatile" hard copy
Ads less intrusive (inserts notwithstanding)
Crosswords more fun with pencil and paper
It's your civic duty.

Are trumped by the con . . .

You have to walk out the door.

Entropy rules.

--SoerenAabye

(To reply, click here)


Okay, I skim the first section in about 30 secs because very often I've read the same wire feeds on the Web the night before. Likewise the sports, funnies, teevee listings, etc. etc. I can live without editorials, and if I want to read opinion I've got good ol' Slate, right? This ought to leave local news. But here's my problem (see if it matches your own experience). 30 years ago my town's newspaper was locally-owned by somebody who gave a damn about our community, and coverage of local news was so good that the paper actually won a Pulitzer. Now it's owned by some corporation in Texas (approx. 900 miles away) which probably would have difficulty finding our town on a map, and in for the sake of cost-cutting the local reporters were the first to get the ax. Jesus Christ could make a guest appearance at a local supermarket and it wouldn't get any coverage. The place where my paper could make the biggest difference is the place where it falls down the most.

--dfs

(To reply, click here)


…There are already plenty of free newspapers (if you want to call them that) in my area. Not only do I not receive them, as a small business owner I will not advertise in them either.

Nor do I advertise in any of my so-called 'brand-name' papers. Why? Because print advertising is useless and expensive. There is no rhyme or reason the layout of ads, other than what fits the papers fancy. Your ad is nearly always doomed to be lumped into a cluster of other ads, buried inside Section K1 unless you are Best Buy or the equivalent. For this privilege you pay 'rack rate' unless you are willing to agree to a multi-year space buy then you can receive prices that are still higher than what the nationals pay. Finally, don't expect them to do anything other than misprint your ad. Layout work and graphics are your problem. Your ad had better be in the right format and resolution because they don't have time to deal with such things, being a print shop and all.

Newsprint is dead, the obit will appear in Section Y.1.A of the Downtown morning edition as opposed to the midtown afternoon edition, please ignore the misprinted date, the correct date should have read...

--printnomore

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