Life After Newspapers

This post is a response to a question raised on the class blog.

If newspapers go away, there will still be several sources of news available.  Offline commercial news sources would continue to exist, like television and radio, which have been hit less hard during the recession.  They will presumably continue to have a news presence on the web.

Specialty publications like the Connecticut Law Tribune, and the Hartford Business Journal will continue to exist.  Their business model appears to be different from most commercial newspapers, radio, and TV, which get most or all of their money from advertising.  Specialty publications instead make much more of their money from subscriptions.  The weekly Hartford Business Journal charges about $80 dollars for a 1-year subscription, which works out to almost $2 per issue.  The Connecticut Law Tribune, for instance, charges $199 for online-only subscriptions, and one source charges more than twice that for print and online access, for a price of about eight dollars per issue, of this weekly publication.  Some specialty publications make money by hosting conferences or events.  If newspapers went away, I would occasionally look at these web sites for a limited slice of local news, that was professionally gathered and edited.  I would read some of the content that was publicly available, but I would not pay the subscription fees.

Nonprofit news organizations would continue to exist, since they get their money from grants, supporting organizations, and audience donations.  Connecticut radio has several examples of this sort of organization, including college radio stations like WQUN, which receives support from Quinnipiac, and streams online.  NPR affiliates WNPR (Give now!) and WSHU (Pledge now!) both get much of their income from donations, and thus should survive the advertising implosion threatening newspapers.  NPR would presumably survive as a national news source, because of its nonprofit approach.  The Connecticut News Project would become a bigger part of my news diet.  So would The New Haven Independent, or an organization like it, if it covered my part of the state.  I would consider making a donation to one of these organizations, if it became my main source of news.

Local blog news would become a larger part of my news diet in a post-newspaper world, but primarily if they cover my town.  A quick search turned up nothing like this for my hometown of Plainville.  I might contribute to a local 'journalistic' blogger, by sending story suggestions, photos, or interesting information, but I would be less likely to voluntarily send money to a person, or to an organization that is for-profit.

I might use Wikipedia as a news source, programming it to provide me with updates when certain articles are changed, about things I am interested in.  This is a poor solution, because it would be limited to things I had a previous interest in, and because Wikipedia claims it is not a source of journalism.  But other sites treat it as such.  Wikipedia's sister site, Wikinews might be a national news alternative, but today it seems to include a lot of material re-written from old-school media sources, especially the Voice of America (which they say is in the public domain).  Perhaps I would be better served going directly to government-funded news like the VOA, BBC, and CBC.

The death of newspapers could either break aggregators like Google News and Yahoo News, or make them more useful.  Yahoo's local news function relies heavily on traditional media offerings, with the Hartford local search showing most of the newspapers and TV news operations in the state, plus Connecticut Public Radio.  When you localize Google News for Hartford, CT shortly before midnight, November 29, you get 14 Hartford Courant articles, 2 Meriden Record Journal articles, and one article each from the Greenwich Time, the New Britain Herald, and something called Connecticut PLUS, which copies and pastes press releases from the governor's office, and the Sound Tigers.  If most of these sources die, the aggregator will have nothing local to aggregate, and they will be useless for local news.  But aggregators would become more useful, if they were able to pluck reliable information from the blogosphere.

When it comes to my news tastes, my first instinct is to look for organizations, rather than individuals, in the hope that a group, whether volunteers, nonprofit, or for-profit, would build in some sort of editorial backstop, and be more likely to continue producing content, even when somebody goes on vacation for a week.  Perhaps this is a personal bias, based on my status as a partial digital immigrant.

Newspaper web sites have at least one thing going for them:  They are the simplest way to go to one place, and get a quick, fairly reliable summary of what is going on in an area.