“The Rumors of My Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated…”

I’m one of a dying breed — I still subscribe to a daily PRINT newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News. I use the Internet and NPR during the day; the paper provides me with information on local events and international features that are fresh to me even if they happened a few days ago. I also occasionally buy the Thursday edition of the New York Times for the lengthy features on international architecture, art, books and fashion. (Oh, yeah, and the Tech Circuits section with David Pogue’s “State of the Art” column).

However, I’m starting to feel guilty about the pollution generated to produce the overflowing bag I haul out to my recycling bins every weekend. And when a newspaper addict like me starts to feel this way, you know it’s a bad sign for the future of print.

I read that Philip Meyer predicted in his 2004 book “The Vanishing Newspaper” that the last print edition of a newspaper would be delivered in 2043. My guess is that it will be closer to 2020, at least in the U.S, and even sooner here in the S.F. Bay Area. I’m not alone; Conde Nast, the publishing giant, seems to be pretty concerned. In April, three of its titles included articles on the moribund newspaper business: The New Yorker’s “Out of Print”; “The Worst Investment in America?” in Portfolio; and “The War on the Times,” in Vanity Fair. Coincidence?

There’s a fascinating four-part documentary I saw on PBS’s “Frontline” last year, called “News War.”  Part 3, “What’s Happening to the News” made the point that we tend to think of newspapers as providing a public service, but they’re just businesses like any other that are beholden to shareholders who have traditionally expected a high profit. So when their economies are threatened, they have to cut editorial staff, which means less first-person reporting. It’s truly frightening (especially in wartime) how few news organizations (and not just print ones) operate international bureaux and support on-site journalists these days. The online and faux TV news programs that a burgeoning audience relies on for "news" do not offer original content, just riffs on other people’s stories (such as I’m doing here). Therefore, it’s critical that media companies figure out a new way to deliver and monetize the news so they can continue their vital function of shoe-leather reporting even if it’s no longer published first on paper.

The reason the title of Howell Raines’ Portfolio article is a question, not a statement, is that there are a growing number of forward-looking publishers who are figuring out a way to stay relevant and make a profit. They are reinventing their print business on the Internet through the hyper-localization of the news. Exhibit A is legacy city newspaper The Philadelphia Inquirer, whose Philly.com online portal is made possible by my client Clickability, the dominant player in On Demand Web Content Management solutions for the publishing industry.

Maybe, as happened with Mark Twain, the rumors of the death of the newspaper business have been greatly exaggerated. The Newspaper Association of America reported in April that newspaper Web sites are attracting consumers in record numbers.