Ruminations on the newspaper industry

There are two interesting stories in newspapers — about newspapers — today, and their wildly diverging ideas on how to save the industry demonstrate how desperate the situation has become. Today in The New York Times, media reporter David Carr suggests the era of free Web content should come to an end.

This from a guy who is the former editor of the Twin Cities Reader and Washington City Paper, two free weeklies. And in a newspaper that abandoned its own failed pay-to-read-the-opinon plan.Why did the paper ditch Times Select? From its own story on the subject:

… Many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.

Dig that? People come to news sites now from search engines and they won’t pay just to read one article. But if you open it up, they’ll be looking at an ad. Yes, online ads are pretty cheap, but the Times decided it was worth it. In 2007, when it stopped charging for that content, the Times had 13 million unique visitors per month, by far the largest number of readers of any other newspaper site.

Carr acknowledges that charging for access will alienate lots of readers. But he suggests the solution may be a tiered plan of access, with some free content, some available at a lower rate and more available at a higher rate. Sounds like a hard sell to me.

Meanwhile, The Christian Science Monitor, which recently stopped publishing a print edition to focus solely on online news, has a story today by Jonathan Zimmerman, a New York University professor, who suggests, “Professors could rescue newspapers.” His idea:

… It’s getting too expensive to gather news. So here’s a novel idea: Let’s get university professors to do it. For real. And, best of all, free of charge. Remember, most professors aren’t paid for what they write now. When I publish an article in an academic journal, I don’t earn a cent. But I also don’t engage more than a handful of readers, mainly fellow specialists in my own field. It wasn’t always that way. A hundred years ago, many of the leading lights in the social sciences and the humanities wrote for the popular press. If we want to revive the press – as well as our own struggling disciplines – we might look to their example.

I’m sure there are some professors who would gladly go along with this, but others who are sick and tired of writing for free! Still, Zimmerman makes the idea of professors as writers sound appealing:

Economists could report on the recession, of course, providing on-the-ground analyses of bank failures, housing foreclosures, and more. Biologists could cover climate change and other environmental issues, English professors could write about the book and film industries, and anthropologists could send dispatches from faraway lands.

… Law professors could cover knotty questions before the Supreme Court, ranging from the detention of suspected terrorists to church-state separation. Medical school professors could describe the latest advances in patient treatment, architecture scholars could write about design, and professors of education could report on school reform.

Then again, how many professors have the time or interest to sit in city council meetings all night or follow Senate proceedings for 10 hours on a Saturday or cultivate sources for a series of stories on corruption at the regional housing authority? Maybe some. (Call us, guys!)

The Albuquerque Journal had a great cartoon by John Trever today (of course it’s not available online yet), slamming the Legislature for not opening conference committees. The committees work out the differences between bills passed in the House and Senate, and are closed to the public, despite the pleadings of ethics-reform advocates.

The cartoon shows a donkey (read: Democrats) poking his head out of the door of the conference committee, telling some regular guy: “Laws are like sausages…You really don’t want to watch them being made!” And the guy is saying, “Maybe not, but I sure as heck want the meat inspector to…” while jabbing his thumb at a man wearing a white butchers’ coat and a press badge (read: Us).