UPDATE: Nick Licata’s office informs me, apropos of my comment that he should’ve included folks like David Goldstein from Horse’s Ass and other bloggers on his “future of newspapers” panel, that they did in fact invite Goldy, as well as this guy. They also asked a couple of other neighborhood bloggers (Tracy Record of the West Seattle Blog did participate). While I get how hard it is to convince people to spend two hours of their day sitting on a City Hall panel for free, I still contend there are plenty of other blogs filling the space between Crosscut (essentially an online newspaper, aimed at older readers who are about the only folks left who read actual papers) and neighborhood microblogs. Blogs like this, this, this, and this, for example.
City council member Nick Licata is hosting a discussion on the future of newspapers. Unfortunately, the panelists are mostly—to steal a phrase from Dominic—the dinosaurs of yesteryear. Here’s the panel:
Roger Simpson, Prof. UW Communications
Doug Underwood, Prof. UW Communications
Ann Bremner, Co-Chair of the Committee for a Two Newspaper Town
Liz Brown, PacNW Newspaper Guild
Jennifer Towery, President Peoria Newspapers Guild, Ilinois
David Brewster, Crosscut Publisher
Tracy Record of West Seattle Blog
Licata opened the discussion by reading a letter from Congressman Jim McDermott bemoaning the death of journalism, noting that the average age of a newspaper reader is 55 and rising, and saying that he enjoys the “serendipity” of paging through a physical paper, which he said is an experience you can’t replicate with “Internet newspapers.”
Roger Simpson, professor of communications at the UW, is saying that the challenge for Seattle is to preserve institutions that provide information and serve community needs. He predicts this will continue to include newspapers, but also “other media.” I’m not so sure newspapers are as necessary as Simpson—who said he “gets three newspapers a day, which means I should live in 1900″— seems to believe.
Doug Underwood, another UW communications professor, is talking now. “What’s essentially happening… is we’re turning to a different era. … [In the 1800s] newspapers… gained audience because they were brilliantly written, witty, people wanted to watch them.” He notes that people read the Huffington Post, not the web sites of the Seattle Times and P-I, because they include “personalities” and entertainment. “The problem is that over time [websites like The Huffington Post] aren’t going to be able to do what they do, because in essence, they depend on already existing companies to produce the product that they essentially rip off and provide at a lower cost for everybody else.” Basically, he’s arguing that only newspapers can produce news—can do what newspapers do.
Ann Bremner and Kathy George from the Committee for a Two-Newspaper Town are talking about the future of the P-I. George is expressing the hope that the city council will provide leadership in finding a buyer for the P-I, which Hearst is technically offering for sale. Another possibility, she says, is creating an endowment to fund local government reporting by a nonprofit news organization. Or the council could help employees set up their own employee-owned newspaper or a public authority along the lines of the Pike Place Market to run a paper. She says “an online only P-I is better than no P-I”—the first acknowledgment that newspapers’ future may be online.
And now they’re talking about Norway.
Liz Brown from the Newspaper Guild is talking now. “Certainly the impact on our members is very great. … In 1993 we had about 820 members at the Seattle Times… and now we’re down to about half that, 420 people. … I mean no disrespect to our brothers and sisters in the broadcast business but the fat is newspapers have traditionally had bigger staff than radio and TV networks… the newspapers set the agenda for the broadcast networks. So the loss for newspapers goes far beyond those people who don’t get their morning read… I too would like to know what Hearst’s intentions are. .. I think it’s fair to say Hearst is looking at continuing the PI as a website only. It will have dramatically fewer employees, and the working conditions of those employees will be much different than they are today… I think it’s fair to say that people are a bit shell shocked.
Jennifer Towery from the Peoria Newspapers is talking about a bunch of potential models for the P-I. They include co-ops, government-subsidized nonprofits, and community-owned. None seem especially likely solutions for the demise of the P-I. Aaaaaaand… She’s still going, despite the fact that council members are getting visibly fidgety.
Licata’s introducing Brewster and Record, and he seems unsure what to call them…. “editors, writers, producers, what do you call yourselves?”
“Journalists,” Record responded.
And she just had the first interesting line of the panel: “When we talk about saving newspapers, we’re really talking about saving journalism.” Not a “delivery model” that consists of dead trees delivered to front doors by delivery trucks, but the news.
Tom Rasmussen asked how readers can know that a blogger isn’t just “saying they heard a bomb, but it’s really just a trash can getting kicked over”—that is, how do you know bloggers aren’t just making shit up?
I imagine they’ll get more into that later. Right now, Crosscut founder David Brewster is talking about what young people want. (!) The web, he says, is “clearly is the future. It clearly is where young people want to be.. .. Young people are very adept at navigating this landscape and it doesn’t take the kind of mediation and paternalism that these older models have provided.”
Liveblog conclusion: What frustrates me about conversations like the one today is that the same people are always invited to the table. If it isn’t David Brewster, it’s David Boardman; if it isn’t a journalism professor who was in the newspaper industry for 36 years, it’s a newspaper guild representative who has been in the industry for 26. Including Tracy Record was a good start, but the rest of today’s panel was the same-old, same-old: People convinced that saving newspapers as newspapers is of paramount importance, with a token former newspaper publisher whose blog is aimed at capturing newspapers’ traditional, 55-and-up audience. It isn’t all just dead trees and microblogs out there; although Record’s blog does an awesome job of covering the minutiae (and bigger stories) that go down in West Seattle, her reach doesn’t extend beyond West Seattle.
Increasingly, news will increasingly be produced somewhere between those two extremes—by online writers who are actually journalists, not the hacks Rasmussen and Licata seem to fear they are, and who cover everything from City Hall to Olympia to local arts and restaurants. Obviously, someone from Slog would have been an obvious choice to ask, but there are plenty of others: David Goldstein of Horse’s Ass, a writer for the failed politics blog PolitickerWA, someone from one of the many local transportation and environmental blogs, Dan Bertolet of Hugeasscity. If those folks had been asked to participate, I imagine they would have bolstered Record’s point: What needs saving isn’t newspaper—those that aren’t already dead are dying—but journalism, and the journalists who do it.
The only reason to buy print is the comics.
No Ziggy, No Peace!
Is Will in Seattle contractually obligated to post a comment after every Slog post? Does he have an actual day job?
i don’t know why but i just renewed my daily subscription to the PI. i guess i feel bad for them. only $35!
Too little, too late. Leave it to our leaders to “create dialogue” on issues that already resolved themselves.
And who paid for the Peoria lady to fly here to tell us stuff we already knew is implausible?
Did Doug Underwood really say that people don’t read the websites of the Seattle Times and P-I? Is he retarded?
I’m a Norway fangirl. What’d they say about it? (That it’s awesome? Because that’s a given.)
These dinosaurs refuse to acknowledge that the death of the newspaper won’t mean the death of journalism. It IS a scary transistional period, and a profitable business model is still to be realized for most, but journalism will eventually prosper in the digital age.
I can’t start my day without my pictures! You ever try to read Mary Worth online?
“Basically, he’s arguing that only newspapers can produce news—can do what newspapers do.”
This is why people get so pissed off at you, Erica. He didn’t say anything of the sort (yes, I’m watching), yet you “paraphrase” him inaccurately for your own ends.
What he said is that TV stations (and bloggers, and wire services) have traditionally piggybacked on the work of newspapers — which is very true. And that nobody has shown how that work will be sustained in the future. A model of “citizen journalists” and bloggers working for page views and a trickle of revenue from Google AdWords revenue is neither sustainable nor desirable.
All well and good, you deep thinkers, but West Seattle Blog rocks. It isn’t the future of community newspapering, it’s the present.
Here’s what killed journalist: The absence of muckraking. The press used to be the Fourth Estate — a power bloc that challenged the rich, the powerful, the Government.
But the P-I and Times? Please, the taste buds on their tongues are worn off from kissing butt so often. They are not newspapers — they are newsletters — the minutiae of insiders exchanging trivialities about things they already all agree on.
A public authority to run a newspaper? Sounds like state-run media. This isn’t China!
Are these people all 75? They talk like they are…who the fuck says “young people” unless you’re eligible for Social Security?
@ #2…
Will in Seattle is just another fine example of what your tax dollars get you.
Why is Licata wasting city time and resources on this? This isn’t city business.
@2: Oh, don’t worry. As you can tell from his posts they take no time — or thought.
Erica, you guys should get involved with this:
http://sites.google.com/a/nonewsisbadnew…
Would be lame to not have somebody from The Stranger involved.
OMG! Guys! Erica’s favorite person in the world Monica Guzman was at this very same meeting.
I wonder how bitchy ECB got. Do you think they even spoke to each other about the banal moronic things ECB posts about Guzman? Do you think Guzman asked her a question?!
Discuss!
Let’s euthanize those old people with their old-school ideas.
@ 15 – plenty of electeds across the nation are getting involved in convening discussions about their own local newspaper crisis. I’m happy to send you background if you’d like: lisa.herbold@seattle.gov
And ECB what did Nick say that leads you to believe that he thinks bloggers and online journalist are hacks? That’s simply ridiculuous. Nick (as a citizen) started online reporting in 1997 when he started his e-newsletter Urban Politics…which, when he became elected, then became one of the first e-newlsetters put out by an elected official in the nation. He neither thinks online journalist are hacks nor does he disparage new technology generally.
True though: most TV newscasts lead with a “The Seattle Times reported today” or a “As the P-I reported” hook. Also I hope Monica, Nicole and Pamela were there and took down ECB (insert stink lines off those three letters). One more: I think Will in Zero Newspaper Seattle has no legs.
@11 for the win. In Click!, the book I picked up at SLOG Happy which I’m half way through, they point out that salacious stories drive a lot of web traffic.
I’ll second that shout out for the West Seattle Blog. During snowpocalypse08, there were user-generated Google maps that show passable and plowed streets, along with (practically) live blogging entire snowy ordeal. I don’t know what I would have done without it.
It was great to have Tracy Record from the West Seattle Blog at the table. Also, when David Brewster spoke glowingly about how the current crisis has encouraged the creativity of former print journalists, he did a shout out to publicola.net – the new online publication of the Stranger’s former editor, Josh Feit along with some other reporters. Check it out; he’s doing good stuff.
NEW RULE: Jesus H christ! It’s high time you slog staff writers institute a mandatory three paragraph jump rule. As in after the third paragraph of your post you must put the rest behind a jump. Us folks who access slog on mobile devices are tired of having to scroll through multiple page views for just one post in order to get to previous posts. Each pageview can take minute to load And I don’t fancy having to take 3 or 4 minutes just get past one post on slog. Fair’s fair – you instituted a mandatory jump rule on people’s comments to your posts, now it’s time you do the same for slog writers – three paragraphs is enough for someone to know is they want to read the whole thing. Better yet you should put the headers at the top of slog so I can just click on the ones that most interest me without having to scroll through every post. Gee whiz why don’cha get with the 21st century alreay?!
What has taken down the daily newspapers (and might even get the Stranger some day) is the move of advertising from print to online. The daily papers’ audience is, thanks to the web, bigger than ever. What is much smaller is their revenue. No simoleons, no staff. It’s that simple.
Thanks for the kind words. I of course agree it would be a fine thing to convene a group with a more diverse range of online voices as well as offline – perhaps the forthcoming NNBN event will serve that. I was a very late add to this event – a couple days ago the agenda went out, I had no prior knowledge it was in the works, and I threw a hissy fit all over Twitter that the future of news was being discussed without any online presence beyond Mr. Brewster (whose contributions, however, I very much appreciated today, as he has more gravitas … though I have worked in media in this town for going on 20 years, I worked in behind-the-scenes newsroom-management roles so no cred of having been a player). Eventually I learned that, as ECB adds here, invitations had been extended but in the end, I wound up the pinch-hitter, and glad to have had the opportunity to contribute.
CityClub, meantime, is having a “future of news business” event next month and is not including anyone from this growing wing of the local news business at all – which is a shame. They did have a “neighborhood blogs” panel a few months back but what happened today is closer to a model for how such discussions might best proceed – bring everybody to the table, don’t have the “newspaper” people over in Corner A, the “broadcast” people in Corner B, “those blog people” in Corner C, etc.
It really is about saving journalism as a business, an art, a profession, a practice. And recognizing that the evolution of delivery-method dominance isn’t necessarily anything more sinister than vinyl to 8-tracks to cassettes to CDs to MP3s ….
Tracy,
I completely agree with your comments from the panel today. Well said. Newspapers are dying, in part, because they failed to innovate.
Out of that chaos, new models are emerging. That’s what people need to be addressing, rather than bemoaning the loss of old media outlets. It’s still early days in how this will play out, but as a former P-I beat reporter and blogger, I am excited by the possibilities. That’s part of the reason why we started TechFlash
By the way, I am slated to be on the City Club panel next month, so I certainly will be touting the power of specialized online niche publications.
Also, MyBallard’s Cory Bergman has a good take on the panel here:
http://www.lostremote.com/2009/01/29/cit…
John Cook, TechFlash
not to beat a dead horse, but in 1997, when licata started his e-newsletter UrbanPolitics – as one of Seattle’s very first online citizen e-journalists – i was 31 and had been usefully online for only three years. ecb was ~19 in 1997. i’m just saying – nick’s history proves he neither thinks online journalists are hacks, nor is he a technophobe…regardless of the gospel according to ecb.
I would have loved to be on this panel.