After 362 years in print, the world’s oldest newspaper, Sweden’s Post-och Inrikes Tidningar, is getting rid of its print edition and making the wholesale jump to digital publishing.
It’s a fate, many ink-stained writers and readers fear, that may await many of the world’s most venerable journals. “We think it’s a cultural disaster,” said Hans Holm, who served as the chief editor of Post-och Inrikes Tidningar for 20 years. “It is sad when you have worked with it for so long and it has been around for so long.”
Why the long face when nothing has changed but the medium? In fact, most dead-tree newspapers long ago abandoned their true purpose of reporting for advertising and that murky concept of “content.” That is the wrong business decision as readers thirst for more news in this information age. Our very own Times-Picayune is a glaring example with more ads than content, limited archives, klunky web interface and late coverage of breaking news. Newspapers must evolve and the (effective use of the) internet is the most obvious medium.
Case in point: Tim O’Reilly tells us that Phil Bronstein, editor-in-chief of the ailing San Francisco Chronicle believes “the newspaper business is broken, and no one knows how to fix it … And if any other paper says they do, they’re lying.” O’Reilly then nails the problem with these questions: If your local newspaper were to go out of business, would you miss it? What kinds of jobs that current newspapers do would go undone?
In response, Doc Searls explains exactly how the newspaper business backed themselves into this corner and reiterates his 11-step way out. These are some of Searls’s best suggestions:
2) Start featuring archived stuff on the paper’s website.
4) Start following, and linking to, local bloggers and even competing papers (such as the local arts weeklies).
5) Start looking toward the best of those bloggers as potential stringers.
7) Stop calling everything “content” … Your job is journalism, not container cargo.
I close with an important Searls point that encapsulates this issue and the inevitable future of news publishing houses: “The human need to increase what we know, and to help each other do the same, is what the Net at its best is all about.”
The biggest advantage of the newspaper, to me, is that scanning the paper alerts me to happenings that I would not have noticed otherwise. I can then look for more on the web if so inclined.
In the case of the TP, the editors at the paper don’t have control over what stories make it onto the website and in what pecking order. I think Nola.com is probably a unique case nationwide because so many people were displaced after the storm, the website became the go to source as opposed to the paper.
I think the TP is in dire straits as well, but it’s not such common knowledge.
Great post, M.