Was there ever an industry that took such a morbid relish in predicting its own demise as the newspaper business? Newspaper people are chronically, maybe even genetically, committed to brooding about the day -- and it's usually soon -- their institutions will be gone.
Predictions of our demise come in two forms, the general and the specific. Of the former, Eric Black writes in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, "Deep thinkers have prophesied for years that newspapers are on a glide path to irrelevance or extinction."
You can't imagine how much this kind of stuff brightens a journalist's day. Irrelevance or extinction? Can't we have both?
As for the specific, a popular new industry Web site links to a prediction by author-seer Michael Crichton that newspapers would be gone in a decade. That decade ended in 2003. It also recalls a 1996 prediction by an alternative newspaper in Sacramento that big-city dailies, like The Sacramento Bee, would be extinct by 2006. Lest the point be lost, it showed a tombstone labeled "Sac Bee." Happily, the Bee survives.
This stuff isn't new. My dad was in the business, and right after World War II he was told that newspapers were doomed because without a war to read about no one would buy one. (For unrelated reasons, Dad went to work for a company that made televisions and went on to do very well.)
When I was a line editor, my own company held conferences at which consultants would hold seminars on the theme, "We -- more specifically, you -- are doomed!" They would deride us as dinosaurs who ground up trees and smeared ink on them, to be replaced by some miracle new technology that would beam information directly into the brains of our former subscribers.
With that happy thought we were urged to return home and put out newspapers that people would really want to read.
My brother-in-law, with perhaps a trace of worry, sent me a story from our trade publication Editor & Publisher (Motto: "Chronicling the impending death of the newspaper business since 1884") that questioned why demonstrably profitable newspapers were jettisoning staff.
He doesn't understand that in our industry gloom is a business plan. The dot-commers were all happy talk, and look what happened to them.
When rates of return get around 20 percent -- after-tax profits for the 12 largest newspaper companies were 20.5 percent last year, but they've since slipped -- newspaper executives begin crawling out on the ledge in suicidal despair. They never jump themselves, but instead heave a few working stiffs over the edge.
That's why there are "Beware falling journalist" signs on the sidewalks outside newspapers in New York, Baltimore, San Jose and Philadelphia that should know better.
The response from the various HQs will be, yes, but readership is declining; we've got competition from the Internet, cable, etc., etc.; costs are up; ad revenues are down; and there's that hardy standby -- currently making a reappearance -- the issue of rising newsprint prices. In newspaper Bibles this chapter comes before Genesis.
To this list we might add the fact that our readers aren't breeding the way they should. Top newspaper analyst John Morton told Black, "Newspaper readers have been dying off faster than they are being replaced by new ones." (Somewhere some newspaper-promotions director is thinking, "Hey, maybe we should run a contest.")
And our readers are indeed getting older. Their average age is 55. But here's a fun fact: The old people have all the money. The old people know that because they read newspapers and tacitly keep it secret from the young people, who don't.
Maybe, although I wouldn't bet on it, one day the newspaper industry will roll over and sink. Even those guys predicting the end of the world will be right some day. In the meantime, there's nothing like a sense of imminent irrelevance and extinction to put spring in a reporter's step and a gleam in an editor's eye. Have I told you about declining readership and rising newsprint costs?
Dale McFeatters is a Washington-based editorial writer and columnist for Scripps Howard News Service. His e-mail address is mcfeattersd@shns.com.
