Washington -- Most
U.S. big-city daily newspapers will disappear in the next
20 years to be reinvented through the Internet and other
"new media" forms, several journalism experts
say.
Paul Gillin, a Massachusetts-based writer
and media consultant specializing in information technology
topics, said he expects the survival of only four or five
major newspapers, which include the Washington Post,
New York Times, Wall Street Journal and
USA Today.
Those newspapers will continue to exist,
he said, because they all made a wise business decision
to invest money for national distribution of their publications
to gain more readers.
Gillin, who writes a blog (online journal)
called "Newspaper Death Watch," said major U.S.
newspapers continue to offer valuable news.
"But their business models simply won’t
survive ... the economics are all working against them,"
Gillin said. By this, he means that papers are experiencing
huge financial losses because of the high overhead for a
large staff of reporters, and for those who design, manufacture
and circulate the product.
The financial losses are made worse by demographic
studies showing that people under age 30 do not read traditional
print newspapers, Gillin said. The younger generation, he
said, now gets its news largely on the Internet.
Gillin said he expects an "explosion"
in what he called small journalism, involving free community
newspapers that can be read for a 25-30 minute commute to
work. The trend, he said, is typified by a company called
Metro International, which publishes free newspapers in
Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and other cities around
the world aimed at offering news that appeals to young,
upwardly mobile professionals.
Gillin also expects corporations to take
advantage of the void left by the demise of daily newspapers
by using "cheap, online tools to become, in essence,
corporate publishers."
"We’re already seeing professional
journalists move into the capacity of corporate publishers,"
he said. That means, Gillin said, "the need for professional
communicators will continue to be high."
Journalists also will need training in becoming
"multimedia" reporters, in which they learn to
shoot video "in the field" to complement their
story.
In addition, Gillin said, journalists will
have to become "aggregators," meaning that a published
story will continue to expand by using such new media tools
as podcasts and videos.
"We have to get rid of this idea that
once a story is published that’s the end of it,"
Gillin said. The journalists will serve as the "funnel"
in which updates constantly are being added to stories,
the method employed by the online information service called
Wikipedia.
Gillin wrote in his February 14 blog that
if Thomas Jefferson (third U.S. president from 1801-1809)
were alive today, "he’d be an active blogger."
The new forms of media, Gillin said, represent "the
most democratic process to hit the publishing industry in
500 years."
OBJECTIVE REPORTING SEEN AS OUTDATED
Steve Boriss, associate director of the
St. Louis-based Center for the Application of Information
Technology at Washington University, sees news becoming
part of "one big industry of entertainment, ranging
from the very serious to the whimsical."
Boriss, who also writes a blog called "The
Future of News," said news reporters will be aggregators
and packagers of news stories, who add their own opinion
and analysis to articles.
He says a "myth" developed over
the past 100 years that news stories were to be reported
with total objectively and without the reporter’s
personal opinion.
But a reporter’s selection of what
are the relevant facts for an article also represents an
opinion, Boriss said. "It’s the opinion of what
[a reporter] thinks is important."
Boriss said the United States, at its creation,
was supposed to be about people expressing themselves freely
and debating issues. Offering your opinion was "sacred,"
he said.
Some 100 years ago, Boriss said, "attempts
were made to turn journalism into a science and journalists
into truth-tellers. It’s a model that’s lasted
longer than it should have." The old "model is
falling apart," he added.
Boriss said major newspapers such as the
New York Times and the Washington Post traditionally have
set the "national conversation," with the TV networks
following their lead.
"But now the Internet is allowing many,
many conversations and all the news doesn’t have to
be filtered through a [small] supply chain," he said.
Boriss wrote in his blog that "after
a Darwinian struggle, Internet news will be the only news
medium to survive."
FORMER REPORTER WOULD BE SORRY TO SEE NEWSPAPERS
GO
Not everyone is thrilled by the predicted
changes for journalism.
Former New York Times reporter
Charles Kaiser, for instance, says that for him reading
the printed newspaper is a "vastly better experience"
than reading it on the Internet.
"There’s just no way you can
see as many stories in an hour [on the Internet] as you
will flipping through the paper version," said Kaiser,
also a noted author and former writer for Newsweek
magazine and the Wall Street Journal.
Kaiser, who writes a blog called "Full
Court Press," said he worries that the extinction of
traditional printed newspapers will have negative unintended
consequences.
Having fewer reporters, especially investigative
reporters, Kaiser said, means "fewer things are looked
at in depth, which is the essential role of the press in
keeping democracy vibrant."
Eric Green /
USINFO Staff Writer
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