Over the course of the past year, first in Seoul and then in Moscow, the biggest players in the global newspaper industry have met to discuss ways of coping with a dire reality. Internet aggregators. Satellite TV. Bloggers. Free mass circulation dailies. These and a host of other new media products are the driving forces of what is clearly set to be the biggest transformation in the history of news.
Newspapers have existed for hundreds of years based on the simple model of people willing to put down money for a piece of paper with information on it. Today, if publishers don't adapt to these new, and rapidly changing, realities, the printed newspaper could eventually go the way of the telegraph.
News companies need to come to terms with the fact that they are "in the business of writing news, not necessarily printing it on paper." That's the premise advocated by media mogul Rupert Murdoch -- who just added the popular myspace.com, a huge mainstream blogging/social networking site, to his portfolio, which includes TV and radio stations, and dozens of newspapers around the globe.
But English-speaking newspaper companies, in particular, may find this transition difficult to swallow, especially since, according to Columbia University media expert Eli Noam, English is one of the rare languages where the word "newspaper" actually has the word "paper" in it. In other languages, the linguistic concept itself is not so directly tied to a mass-market wood-based product.
The shift towards thinking about digital-rather than print- based news is the "biggest step we've had to take in the last 100 years," said Katie Vanneck of the UK's Telegraph newspaper. As a result, the buzzword at progressive newsrooms across the world is "convergence". Jim Brady, the executive editor of washingtonpost.com, told the publishers and editors in Moscow last week about the Washington Post 's new converged newsroom, which includes a multimedia control room, and TV and radio studios. The paper has also equipped many of its reporters with high-tech digital cameras.
Not everyone, however, agrees with this sort of multitasking. Russel Merryman, the editor of Al-Jazeera's English website, recently wrote that, "newspapers are being led by the nose into competing in the 24-hour news cycle online; spreading their resources ever more thinly as they branch into blogging, podcasting, video journalism and whatever fad and fancy they hope will save them from being eclipsed by the TV news junkies." Merryman and others think newspapers should, instead, "stick to their core business, and stay distinctive by doing what they're good at." He imagines the Post might not have gotten its Watergate scoop had the newsroom back then been operating under today's new multi-functional digital ethos.
Meanwhile, some of the biggest names in the business are in fact being quite cautious about this shift. Gavin O'Reilly, publisher of the UK's Independent and current president of the World Association of Newspapers (the main organiser of these industry- wide gatherings), said, "we should never lose sight of what built this businesses... the printed product ... where we make most of our profits. Everyone wants to talk about digital, and I understand that, but let's not lose sight of our core product."
Journalist-turned-super-blogger Jeff Jarvis is another prominent naysayer. He thinks newspapers can adapt to changing realities by wasting "less effort, talent, and money on commodity news, the news we already know, the news we could write ourselves if we watched CSpan or CNN. If you can link to it, if the audience already knows it, why spend ever-more-precious resources redoing it?" Jarvis asks on buzzmachine.com, his famous blog. "Instead, it is better to concentrate on a newsroom's real value, reporting: journalists' ability to ask the questions people in power don't want asked, to be an advocate for the public to power, to get to the bottom of debates, to add perspective, to be local. Journalists aren't the only ones who can do that, but that is still their primary value."
In Moscow, Juan Senor of the Innovation International Media Consulting Group urged industry players to search their souls for the very basics of what the newspaper business is all about. Senor's "SOUL" equation breaks down into "Sensuousness -- using paper that feels good, that smells good, that doesn't make your fingers dirty; Omnipresence -- the paper should be available everywhere; Unique -- it should differentiate itself from the competitors. And Local -- it needs to be connected to the local community."
Some newspapers, meanwhile, are coping by changing their entire business model; thinking of their product as a weekend moneymaking gig, rather than a seven-day affair. That means bigger and bigger weekend editions (Saturday as the new Sunday), with many more specialised pull out sections to attract a diverse audience that wants to curl up on the couch on their days off with a good article, something the Internet still can't provide -- at least not yet. George Brock, the Saturday editor of the UK's Times newspaper, said that all papers were looking for "killer" supplements with which they could attract younger readers.
It is with this major market segment that much of the future viability of the industry depends. According to Murdoch, younger readers "are not abandoning print; they are abandoning news." Whether or not that is true, it might be why some newspapers -- like the Norwegian daily Dagbladet -- have even begun delivering their content to Play Stations. Other European papers are looking more seriously at e-paper and other digital devices. The Guardian, for one, has just announced that it will go with a web-first policy when it comes to breaking news, the first major British paper to do so. The move is meant to better serve a global readership, allowing the Guardian to go beyond the "limitations of the daily paper".
Whether or not newspapers will still exist in ten years, finding out is certainly going to be an interesting ride.
