How much longer will print newspapers be around? Earlier this month, in a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Rupert Murdoch gave a shockingly clear-eyed appraisal of print journalism in the digital age, calling for an end to complacency in the face of “a revolution in the way young people are accessing news.”
“They don’t want to rely on the morning paper for their up-to-date information. They don’t want to rely on a god-like figure from above to tell them what’s important. And to carry the religion analogy a bit further, they certainly don’t want news presented as gospel. Instead, they want their news on demand, when it works for them. They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it.”
Murdoch clearly understands the forces at work and is keen to adapt in times of change. Print is still important, he says, but less so by the day. We should not take for granted that the traditional broadsheet will still be in use even one generation from now. We must focus on improving the way news is presented on the web. He talks about the inevitable shift to web advertising, hybrid forms for web content combining text and video (simply a merging of two of his empires), and bringing blogs into the news apparatus.
It is this last point about blogs that made me wary… especially in terms of the “control over the media” that he articulates in the quote above. The founder of Fox News understands that control can go two ways… Control can be construed simply as more choice for the viewer – more formats, more frequency, but also the power to choose the kind of spin, or presumed shared values that come with your news. This has been the success of Fox, with its trademark blend of hard news and hyper-politicized slant. But Fox is billed as serious news and is relied on by millions as a primary source of information. How much are they thinking about that as a choice? Here we get into control of a different kind. It’s not hard to imagine a few key blogs getting hitched up to a newspaper as a sort of web-based O’Reilly Factor or Hannity and Colmes. Many newspapers are already experimenting with bringing blogs into the fold, but there’s still a fairly clear line between news and commentary. What if blogs, or something descended from blogs, became the news?
Everyone is wondering where the blog phenomenon might lead. Is it a transitional medium that will eventually lose steam? Or will blogs get co-opted by big media and join the spectacle of punditry that so dominates television and radio? Say what you will about bloggers today – that they are hacks, windbags, amateurs – but it’s hard to argue that they aren’t independent, that they don’t function in their own sphere. What’s been so impressive is how they’ve expanded the domain of the op-ed and letters-to-the-editor pages, actually emphasizing the line between opinion and news. Blogs can break stories too, and often act as a corrective to the mainstream media. But take away professional reporting altogether and you remove the foil that defines their existence. There’s a new kind of media diversity coming into being on the web: new kinds of journalism, the evolution of an in-between class of citizen journalists, and of course, blogs. How does one weave it all together to form a view of the world? Murdoch seems to have some ideas. What’s scary is that he might be dreaming of a world in which all news comes in a sort of bloggish wrapping – the Foxification of web news.
Other useful reading on the uncertain future of newspapers:
– “Abandoning the News” – report from the Carnegie Corporation about news-reading habits of 18 to 34-year-olds
– good comment on the Carnegie report
– good post on PressThink: “Laying the Newspaper Gently Down to Die”
– from the Economist: “Yesterday’s Papers”
– from American Journalism Review: “Reversing the Slide” – on the Washington Post’s efforts to counter a recent sharp decline in circulation