Save This Newspaper! Your Ideas Here

By: Will Bunch Since the week I started at the Philadelphia Daily News in 1995 -- when I was told I might be laid off before year's end -- there have supposedly been only two certainties in Philadelphia: taxes and the eventual death of the city's tabloid newspaper. And yet we survived that shutdown threat and so many other crises -- severe job cutbacks, union strikes, a thermonuclear attack (OK, I made up that last one, but I've come to believe that the Daily News would survive an atom bomb, if need be).

That said, the Daily News -- celebrating, with no fanfare, its 80th birthday this year -- is caught up more than most newspapers in the industry's current death spiral. Long-term macro trends -- the lure of electronic media and the decline of reading -- have been met with shortsighted micro solutions. These include cutting back news staffs and the number of pages while raising the newsstand price -- an odd strategy for expanding readership and for long-term survival.

As I write this, the Daily News -- where, even before this fall, the newsroom, with its depopulated desks, looked like a neutron bomb had struck, and where management chose to not even replace three staffers who died in 2004 -- is nevertheless losing another 25 journalists, or 19% of the total.

When the cuts -- through a voluntary buyout package -- are completed, the Daily News will attempt to publish a big-city newspaper with just 110 or so people. That number includes line editors and copy editors and photographers and graphic artists and clerks, as well as the reporters in news, sports, and features. To give you a sense of scale, when Pope John Paul II came to Philadelphia in 1978, the Daily News had 44 news reporters and photographers on the story. That couldn't happen in 2006, unless someone volunteers on his own time.

It's human nature, I guess, but the first inclination is to blame somebody, and there's plenty of blame to go around. Since the 2004 political season, it's been fashionable to lash out at blogs and their supposed lack of journalistic standards, as if everything in the news business had been just hunky dory before these Internet pests came along. Of course, bloggers are just the latest of many reactions to a trend that's played out over nearly 100 years, once newspapers ceased to be the nation's only mass medium.

You've probably seen the numbers -- that newspaper readership has plummeted from 1.3 papers for every American household in the 1930s to less than .5 today. Just over half of Americans now read a daily newspaper.

The other easy target is corporate greed. And there's no doubt that the 25% profit demands of big newspaper companies -- including the folks who sign my paycheck at the Knight-Ridder Corp. -- are greedy indeed. They are also stupid, since with the advent of new media, a new player like Craig Newmark of Craigslist can offer free classified ads on the Internet and make a nice living for himself with a more rational ?profit deal.? But huge profit demands are also ? just the way it is. Billionaire trust fund babies with a net worth based upon exorbitant promises to Wall Street will not simply go quietly into the night.

But assigning blame won't save the Philadelphia Daily News. Besides, much of the blame really lies with us, as journalists. We have, for the most part, allowed our product to become humorless and dull. In an era when it seems most people truly will be famous for 15 minutes, newspapers have stubbornly avoided creating personalities ... or having a personality, for that matter.

In a pathologically obsessive quest for two false goddesses -- named Objectivity and Balance -- we have completely ceded the great American political debate to talk radio, cable TV, and the Internet, where people have learned that politics is actually interesting and even fun when people are allowed to take sides.

We prefer to talk down to the public rather than talk to them. Even at our very best -- and there are many, many talented newspaper journalists in America -- we are more likely to aim at wooing contest judges than at wooing new readers. And we have a knee-jerk tendency to defend our narrow world of messy ink printed on dead trees, when instead the time is here to redefine who we are and what we do.

We are, and can continue to be, the front-line warriors of information -- serving up the most valuable commodity in a media-driven era. But that means we must be the message, not the medium, and so we must adjust to give consumers news in the high-tech ways that they are asking for, not the old-tech way that we are comfortable with.

If we don't change, we will die -- and it will be our fault.

It defies all the conventional wisdom, but I believe that the Philadelphia Daily News can be an agent of that change -- and not a victim. In fact, in seeking to destroy the Daily News in a death of a thousand cuts, our corporate masters in San Jose have, unintentionally, liberated us -- because having nothing left to lose is another term for freedom.

Because with a staff that is now too small to cover every news story, we can learn how to cover just the stories that truly matter to people, and cover the heck out of them. Because a newspaper with 20 personalities that the reader knows and seeks out every morning is better off than a newspaper with 200 faceless reporters covering zoning meetings. Because a news organization like the Daily News that seems small in the print world can make itself huge in the brave new world of 21st Century media.

Indeed, the Daily News has already done just that with my Attytood, one of the first and most widely read blogs by a newspaper reporter, and with PhillyFeed, one of the first newspaper podcasts. That initial success merely shows that we can take it to the next level, as we must.

We need to lose our old identity with one dying medium, newspapers, and stress our most valuable commodity, the one that we truly own, and that is news ? without the paper. Thus, we must now be news organizations, or ?norgs.?

Yes, it's a cheap gimmick. But it's a cheap gimmick aimed at starting a valuable conversation that should have begun years ago. With all the gloom and doom in the newspaper business these days, the focus here in Philly has been on Nov. 4, the day that 100 journalists (25 here, and 75 at the Inquirer) will mostly leave the profession, or leave town. I want the focus now to be on Nov. 5, the first day of the rest of our lives for those of us here, and around the country, staying put.

***

What do you think should be done to save America's news organizations? Send your suggestions to letters@editorandpublisher.com.