The Fate of the Paper News

The Fate of the Paper News
by Loren Skaggs
March 18, 2009

I was recently at a conference discussing local advertising for a specific industry. When our expert in media buying discussed the channels for a particular campaign, he mentioned only one daily newspaper, The Seattle Times.

Now, as of today, the print version of the other major Seattle paper, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, has ceased to exist, moving to an all-online format. And the Eastside Journal-American is long, long gone. But I was a little more surprised to see that The News Tribune of Tacoma hadn't made the media buying cut. The Tribune has long been a player in the geographical region covered by this particular advertiser.

After the conference, I asked the media buyer about this omission, and he said that he doesn't expect the Tribune to last much longer, either. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was "“ I guess it's a form of denial that something could ever happen to my hometown newspaper.

But it doesn't stop there "“ speculation is now that the venerable Seattle Times itself may not be around much longer, leaving the bulk of the Puget Sound region with no daily newspaper at all.

Well, allow me to rephrase that, slightly: no daily newspaper. The news isn't going anywhere, at least not right away. The Hearst Corporation, which owns the Seattle P-I, will almost certainly continue to operate the news organization as an online-only entity. The Tribune and Times would likely do the same. What isn't going to continue is the printing of news on paper.

So, does this mark the long-anticipated transition to the paperless society? Has the Internet finally triumphed in the battle of page vs. pixel?

Well, probably not. Not yet, anyway. Smaller community and specialty papers (sometimes called "shoppers" by traditional news people, usually with some level of derision) still seem to be doing fine. I can still pick up a copy of The Seattle Weekly and The Stranger on any Seattle street corner, and the Sammamish Review still shows up on my driveway every week. But I suspect that will change eventually, too.

The newspapers have yet to fully adapt to the new realities of the Internet. It'll be interesting to follow the experiment that the Seattle P-I has embarked upon. I wish them all the best, but I suspect that it's eventually going to be a very different animal in a very short time. What will it look like? I wish I could say, but it's a question a lot of people are asking.

Internet guru Clay Shirky takes a stab at it in a recent post on his blog. He compares the current state of affairs in communication to the period 500 years ago when the printing press was beginning to supplant the previous forms of communication. It's an apt comparison; at the time, not even the smartest people could possibly foresee what the printing press would come to mean, and how to adapt the then-current communication models to the new medium.

Sorry to say this, as I am a newspaper lover, but Shirky is pessimistic. His answer to the question, "How will newspapers survive?" is simple: They won't. They will just "“ disappear. And nobody knows what will rise to take their place.