Horse Drawn Wagons and Newspapers

A paper commissioned by the Columbia University Journalism School basically says the government should step in to save the newspapers across the county. One of the nations largest newspapers, The New York Times, recently announced it is laying off additional workers as its market share contracts adding fuel to the fire that the print media needs saving. My questions; Why?

In 1900 when the automobile industry was beginning to grow I wonder if there was talk of saving the horse drawn wagon industry? After all the horse drawn wagon industry was an important part of the transportation industry and had been for many years. The horse drawn wagon manufacturers in 1900 and the Newspaper producers today are in the same position. They are in an industry that is in transition.

In 1900 the transportation industry did not go away. It evolved into motorized transport. Some of those companies that saw the change coming evolved. Consider Studebaker. Studebaker had been around since the Civil War building wagons for the US Military and at the turn of the 20th Century they realized they were not in the business of making wagons, but in the business of providing transportation products. The survived for nearly another 70 year by switching to building cars and trucks. They successfully made the transition from horse and buggy to automobiles to survive much longer than their contemporaries.

The newspaper industry is the modern horse drawn wagon industry. It does not need a bailout from the government, in fact no industry does. The first thing the newspaper industry needs to do it realize they are not in the newspaper business, they are in the news information business. Perhaps the New York Times and the Washington Post may not survive, but that is OK because somebody will take their place.

While Studebaker made the transition at the turn of the 20th Century, we also saw the rise of the replacement transportation companies like Dodge, Ford and Chevrolet. As we transition into the 21st Century we are already seeing the replacement for the newspapers in publications like The Drudge Report, Breitbart and Bloomberg.

The newspapers do not need a bailout, they need to die a natural death. In a few years a newspaper will be about as useful to a modern world as a horse drawn wagon built in a government subsidized factory.

The Slow Death of Old Journalism

I spent Memorial Day weekend in Atlanta and saw something shocking.

One of the great urban newspapers of the nation, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution had completely transformed itself. The once stately masthead with respectable headline font had now degraded into lowercase Times New Roman. Its size had shrunk into weekend same guide territory. This newspaper, once one of the premier dailies of the South, now looked much less respectable than our local and regional papers. It carried about as much news, too.

There is something to be said about a newspaper's audience and market. The New York Times and Washington Post struggle while the Washington Times and Wall Street Journal have avoided some of the same problems. It seems that conservatives tend to like actually holding a newspaper in their hand, turning the pages to read the news, in larger numbers than liberals. Our nation's capital actually supports two conservative dailies ( the Washington Examiner also seems to be doing well.)

The problems associated with newspapers lie in the fact that they continue to rely heavily upon their reporting of current events. By the time a major city newspaper has published and delivered, most people have either seen the news on television or read about it on the internet. Small town papers have always operated on tight budgets, but will probably survive because who else will report on doings in Cumberland, Moorefield, or Keyser? Who else will publish the picture of the Kelley and Church Award winners so that their parents can buy fifty copies apiece? The Mineral Daily News Tribune has a much more encouraging future than the Boston Globe.

Big city papers need to redefine their niche by focusing more in depth. The internet and TV will never be able to give its audience the kind of information and detail that print journalism offers. In the 1980s many papers moved away from such stories towards flashy colors and more concise writing to mimic the success of USA Today. Papers following this model give precisely the same quality journalism as the internet, but much more slowly. Also the hysterical liberalism adopted by many editorial boards seems to only sell in Charleston, West Virginia. Try moderating to the level of the market.

It's time for print journalism to remember that they are capitalists and act accordingly. It would be a real shame to see some of these old publications die off.