This morning, I read an article in the online version of the San Francisco Chronicle. The story was originally written by a contributor of Investopedia. Its title read: “Technology And The Death Of Print Media” — an over-simplified, haphazard article.
The author of the story is a mr. Greg McFarlane. Mr. McFarlane has previously written articles for Investopedia on topics such as “Sports With Winning Bonuses”, “The Increasing Costs Of College”, “Is A Bad Reputation A Bad Investment?”, and “Financial Implications Of College Football Playoffs”.
Unfortunately, Investopedia doesn’t tell us more about mr. McFarlane, so we don’t know what his specialism really is, but judging by the titles of his previous contributions, it isn’t printing nor the media.
Mr. McFarlane’s article starts with a gross generalization: “The print industry will soon be more dead than Rasputin. It’s inevitable, and your very reading of this article reinforces the point. While it’s not exactly news that electronic devices are rapidly supplanting physical books and newspapers, what about the ancillary results? (…)”
The above contains a logical error. It does not follow that print media is dead because you’re reading an article on a digital device. It could be that print media as a market is becoming smaller, but it’s far from dead. It suffices to read some advertising market magazines and journals to know there’s still a lot of money going around in print advertising.
Except for advertising income to decrease at a much slower pace than what the author would love you to believe, there’s also history. And history shows us that most information channels get hit when a new output medium becomes popular. But in almost every case the old medium bounces back, although usually with a smaller customer base.
A couple of examples: when TV sets went mainstream, it was said movie theaters would disappear. When CDs became popular, vinyl LPs almost entirely disappeared from the market only to have started becoming popular again (admittedly, by a small number of enthusiasts). Ever from the date the PC and laser printers made their entry in the office, pundits have been shouting the paperless office was on hand, but we churn out more paper these days than ever before.
Despite all the drama, we are still going to the movie theater, listening to LPs, printing documents, and even digital photography, which has “killed film” hasn’t killed film completely — many art photographers won’t give up on film because of its unique, irreplaceable characteristics.
So, if anything, it’s not that simple.
What are print media, anyway?
Identifying print media with newspapers — which mr. McFarlane does in his piece — is dead wrong. Except for newspapers there are magazines, books, there is fabric printing, poster printing, photo printing, material printing, etc., etc. The printing industry as a whole is healthy as never before. A large vendor like EFI keeps acquiring smaller companies in niche markets at a high pace in order to fulfill the needs of its customers, which increasingly are smaller on-demand print suppliers.
Photo book on-demand printing is a growing market, and so is the market of self-publishers who want to hand out and sell paper books.
So, print media is a lot more than just what newspaper publishers generate. Perhaps the article should have read: “…the death of publishers as we know them”. Because it’s true publishers are having a hard time catching up with their markets. That has little or nothing to do with the “horrors” of the printed medium itself — “The print industry is obsolete to the point where even calling it the “print” industry will soon seem quaint and obsolete itself. It’s important to remember that the “print” aspect of it, the application of ink to paper, is secondary at best. Printing is just a vehicle for the conveyance of information, which for several centuries was the most efficient way of doing so, and now it isn’t, any more than ponies are the most efficient way of getting mail from Missouri to San Francisco,” according to mr. McFarlane.
Where the author gets this idea from is a mystery, but the application of ink to paper is just as secondary as carving computer chips from silicon. It still is an efficient way to convey information as it does not need battery power, it may very well be more eco-friendly than digital, and the paper ‘information carrier’ can be saved for centuries to come — which still is a problem with digital information; who will guarantee us that XML or HTML still is fashionable technology in 20 to 30 years time?
[As for ponies, even this is arguable: in some very polluted and traffic heavy European cities, horses are starting to be used again to distribute beer barrels and the likes to cut down on noise and in general on ecological costs.]
Every idiot a journalist?
One of mr. McFarlane’s observations is that journalists are obsolete in an era in which
every fool with an iPhone can create a news item. The question here is what we want as information consumers.
Do we want facts that have been double-checked? Or do we trust the guy with the iPhone who happens to shoot a video of a situation he probably doesn’t understand to a full degree? Where does this idea come from that common people can be journalists?
The idea comes from respected news channels taking over the ‘reporting’ by common people of events when no professional reporter was present or could be present, and from the stream of comments and observations made on media such as Facebook, Twitter, etc., of situations and events by people who are living these.
A nice example we all know is the Arabic spring. Egyptians who were present on Tahrir Square used smartphone cameras to show the violence used against the people. Smartphone recordings of the recently capsized Costa Concordia showed us how passengers tried to escape from a sinking ship. It all looks terribly genuine and exactly the same as what a ‘real’ news reporter would show us, but nevertheless, it pays to examine the cases of citizen journalism we have seen so far.
In the case of the Egypt uproar we assume the videos we saw were authentic, but in fact we can’t tell if they were. In the case of the Costa Concordia, what we saw were frantic images shot at low light, showing us nothing but the chaos on board of the ship.
What is the added value of such images, I wonder. Don’t we all know it must have been chaos and downright hell for these passengers? The only added value of these images is their entertainment value, nothing else. It’s exciting to see how others are struggling to survive — it reminded me of gossip as it gets spread around in pubs and at parties. It’s like watching monkeys at the zoo. But it has no news value of itself — for example, seeing those videos didn’t tell me where the captain was, and whose fault this disaster is.
The question of authenticity is a more important one. Whenever something happens like the protests in Great-Britain last year, or the bloody events in Syria, we need objective reporters. Citizen journalists are too closely involved in the events, and they always — it’s inevitable — take sides.
That is the problem with all citizen journalism: you can’t tell what is really going on, who is to blame or who is responsible, because you don’t get an objective report of the full story.
Professionally trained journalists are supposed to fill in those blanks for us. They are supposed to find out who is responsible, what exactly happened, and how it relates to other events and circumstances. However, a growing number of professional journalists don’t bother anymore. They are under such a lot of pressure to spit out content, they walk unprotected in very dangerous areas, and they aren’t given the resources to dig deeper.
The result is they will just take over press releases or half-baked news (not rarely copying citizen journalists’ observations without questioning).
To perform their task well, journalists need a lot of time and resources to find out what the story is about. Most newspapers won’t support them with time nor resources because of short-term profit margins and cost ‘effectiveness’.
So it’s not that citizen journalism is ‘good enough’; it’s that journalists are increasingly giving up for many reasons…
Media companies are not publishers
There was a time that publishing houses were just that: publishing houses, and newspaper publishers were newspaper publishers. The managers at the top of these companies were publishers who knew the publishing processes inside out. Today, a publishing house is part of a media company. They are just another ‘business unit’ and are subjected to the same rigid rules of short-term profitability as the rest of the organization.
If it’s a newspaper the company has in its portfolio, the rag is forced to perform better (read: generate more profit) year by year. This is only possible by automating all the processes that can be automated, and by putting pressure on content creators.
A genuine publisher would have a feel for the business and in a less profit-driven world would ensure the newspaper’s journalists can do the best job they’re capable of. Ultimately, this is what sells newspapers. It’s the ability of a newspaper to bring news that’s certified to be correct, put into context, and analyzed by professionals who have been trained to do so.
Media companies’ senior management, however, splits up the company as soon as they think the profit targets won’t be made. They leave the newspaper business to go belly up. This is touted as good management practice, but it’s the reason why an increasingly lower number of people read newspapers — paper or digital ones.
Yes, digital ones too.
The best example of why people won’t pay for news anymore was the first iPad newspaper published by Murdoch. The same iPad mr. McFarlane loves so much didn’t sell more newspaper apps because the millions of dollars Murdoch invested in it were spent on advertising, not on content.
The first Murdoch iPad rag was old news reformatted for the new device. Nobody wanted it. The arrogance and disrespect towards his customers this “publisher” showed so vehemently was a tad too obvious for even the most enthusiastic iPad user. What Murdoch and his colleagues don’t seem to understand is that there is no short cut in publishing news or anything else. It’s the content that matters and presentation is secondary.
If newspapers would invest more into sound journalism, more people would read them. But if you equal ‘good content’ with a copy-paste operation of a press release that you didn’t even bother to check for errors first, then it doesn’t matter whether your newspaper was printed or displayed on a digital device.
Adding ‘interactive’ ads doesn’t help either.
Content creation and news gathering is as much a skill as it is an art. It requires creativity, a feeling, a ‘nose’, and much work. If you get that right, people will want to read your publication because they will instantly recognize it as valuable.
The problem with creativity is that it requires nurturing, time and a lot of freedom. Profitability is a natural given with any business, but the short-term year-over-year growth that is expected from those who have to create the publication makes it impossible to do their job well. This is every bit as true with magazines and books.
While every business operation is destined for profitability without which it cannot survive, some businesses and markets are just not suited for perpetual and continuous growth by the quarter.
People like mr. McFarlane however, think digital content carriers are going to be the cure for every bad. Already, some iPad publishers find people are unwilling to pay for them, and they can’t understand why. It’s clear, though, that a couple of videos of a Cadillac or some brand breakfast cereals isn’t what makes an iPad publication interesting, purchase-worthy material.
What digital publishers often forget is that new digital devices are always involved in a hype cycle. As soon as the novelty wears off, you lose a considerable part of your audience.
Furthermore, paper information carriers may be static but there will remain a large number of people who will favor paper media. It doesn’t need batteries or recharging, and it’s vandalism and theft proof. Finally, paper publications may create less copyright problems and can’t invade your privacy.
