Panelists in NYC Grapple With Question: Does Old Media Have a Future?

By: Anna Crane Tuesday night at a Columbia University event called Journalism Dialogues on The Changing Media Landscape, an audience member asked the five-member panel, ?How can we protect journalism?? The response was: update your business model and you can keep your journalistic values.

And for newspapers, that means now.

The business model for the newspaper industry has profoundly changed, said Bill Grueskin, managing editor of Wall Street Journal Online, and the industry is not prepared for the ramifications of online adverting.

?The economics are going to change in ways we can?t yet appreciate, and not all those are positive,? Grueskin said. Some of the negativity, he said, is that online advertising goes against journalistic tendencies. The revenue importance of unique page visits has forced editors to change the way they produce stories. A reader will not click on twenty stories, he said, but they might click on twenty pictures.

?I?d have to be extraordinarily myopic not to be concerned as a newspaper editor,? said Rex Smith, editor of the Albany (N.Y.) Times Union. Although panel members expressed confidence that newspapers will be able to keep up with the changing media world, it?s going to take some effort. As Smith said, someone has predicted that the last American newspaper reader will die in 2042 -- and newspaper people will be out there propping him up.

Smith?s comments were among the most bold made by the panel, hosted by the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and The William Randolph Hearst Foundations. Smith and Grueskin represented the newspaper element. The New Media realm was represented by Michelle Leder of the financial blog Footnoted.org; Kevin Sites, a correspondent for Yahoo News; and Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia.

Wales said that while some readers turn to his site for news, it is mostly and best used as a supplement to mainstream news sources ? a great source for background and summaries, he said, but not a major competitor of newspapers.

?If newspapers are worried about things like Wikipedia , they?re worrying about the wrong things,? said Wales. ?They should be worried about Craig?s List.?

Smith said that Internet coverage has already changed the way his newspaper handles the news. He tells his staff: ?Report for Web. Write for print.?

At the Times Union, he said, there is an intentionally different standard for Web than there is for print. Since immediacy is the value that the Web brings to a newspaper, he said, you have to draw the line of standards a little bit different.

?I don?t think it?s such a problem if something goes on the Web with copy-editing problems,? said Smith.

Over the next few months, the Times Union?s Web site will also feature more localized coverage, which, according to Smith, is what print editions need to do in order to compete with the 24-hour news cycle. Local news, he told E & P, is what newspapers have to offer, so why should a newspaper give readers the news that they saw last night on TV?

Newspapers have drifted away from catering to local audiences, but this is what readers really want, said Smith. He said that newspapers need to embrace online citizen journalism which gives stories a local touch, while maintaining the storytelling and investigative reporting that ?builds a brand? for the paper.

?That kind of work is valuable to the community whether online or in print,? he said.

Grueskin said that a building a brand and an established relationship with readers is one of the reasons that WSJ.com has been largely considered a success, and why it is able to charge subscription fees for its online content. With 800,000 subscribers, he said, if WSJ.com were a daily newspaper, it would have the fourth highest circulation in the country.

Smith, however, had a different take on why WSJ.com has had such a success in charging for online services: People can charge the subscription to their work as a business expense.

Unlike most daily newspapers, said Smith, the Wall Street Journal has a very specific niche that people rely on for their financial news. If most other daily newspapers tried to charge for access, he said, people would just get their news from another source. This same logic is why Smith says that newspapers need to localize their content.

For Grueskin at WSJ.com, some common principals that govern newspapers apply to his online editing, particularly the norm that readers rarely make it past the jump in an article, whether online or in print. ?Journalists spend a lot of time writing things that nobody but their mother reads,? he said.

Keeping this in mind, Grueskin said that his editors will often edit online content for length. Just because we have unlimited space, he said, does not mean readers have unlimited time.