It is a grim business—journalism, these days—at least according to most journalists I meet. And I meet more than my share, thanks to being some sort of journalist myself. We have, as a trade, always been subject to trends and fashions, and the trend towards desolation at the future of all mainstream news organizations—newspapers especially—is somewhat reinforced by rapidly declining circulation and income numbers in most of them.
Indeed, those who think journalists are never right about anything seem inclined to make an exception for their predictions of their own demise. But, as someone who, as I recently confessed, has been in and out of the trade through 40 years, I am not inclined to make that exception. I’m fairly sure journalists are wrong, even about their own impending extinction.
That big fat newspapers of the kind I never exactly liked anyway—chock with sports results, stock market listings, comic strips, movie schedules, classifieds, stereo ads, supermarket flyers, bridge columns, horoscopes and things of that nature—are gone the way of the stegosaurus, we may take as read.
“Thanks to the Internet” (and to whom do I send the card over there?) a similar “de-bundling” is happening in the world of network television, where programs of every genre ever thought suitable to mass audiences (including even news reports) were all profitably tied together.
This was a “business model” that lasted about a century for newspapers, about half a century for TV. I mention that out of smug self-satisfaction: the older the medium, the longer the run.
“Newspapers” themselves are much older, and the provision within them of items of other than strictly news interest goes back at least three centuries.
It is the “bundling” mechanism to which I am calling attention here.
By the grace of personal eccentricity, I have read fairly widely in the “news books” through the 17th century, and the sheets of the 18th. In retrospect. I am struck by the Internet quality of the earliest printed journalism. All the bits and pieces that would later be assembled into big fat multi-section broadsheet metropolitan newspapers are present somewhere, but in their pre-bundled state. (Granted, no movie listings or stereo ads; but trust me, our ancestors had theatre and music.)
Many of the comparisons may be extended to fine details. Consider, for instance, the coffee shops of old London and cafés of old Paris, where people went to plug themselves into the news sheets, just as they plug their laptops into Starbucks today. One gets glimpses of technology moving backwards, of ever more cumbersome machinery to deliver the same sort of thing.
As we find in digital today, there was, in the genre of political entertainment, more opinion than reporting. This is true of all previous centuries. It is a great fact of nature, known apparently to Rupert Murdoch among others, that the gathering of news is an expensive business and always has been; that, by comparison, opinion can be supplied quite cheaply.
Yet the hunger for a little bit of knowledge is always with us, even among the most opinionated, and therefore the market for hard news must be ultimately sustainable. It is only a question of making people pay.
The same Murdoch has made some modest headlines in recent weeks with his proposals to start charging for services that the search engines are poaching from his media outlets and distributing to news aggregators free. He is confident that people will pay for what they really want, and therefore the disintegrating business model of advertiser-subsidized print and broadcast can be replaced with something equally workable.
Murdoch is meanwhile rightly alarmed by the twin threat of government regulation and government subsidy, freezing up markets that should be allowed to sort themselves out, before they are Big-Brothered.
He presents himself as the advocate of the consumer, plausibly in light of his own long success in titillating eyeballs. He must know what people will pay for—and how much.
And, as he will surely know, people are already willing to pay well for “the hard stuff,” and have been all along. Especially in the professional worlds of business and politics, there are many small newsletters and specialized briefings, available today through Internet and e-mail, that require no advertising support whatever. Equivalents to the old newsletter of Jacob Fugger (which goes right back into the 15th century) are alive and well because they serve the direct interests of money and power. People with big stakes in the world need to know what is really going on.
The great majority of people have no such big stakes. Their curiosities have no such focus, and they anyway can’t afford private intelligence services.
They do have the vote, however, and I do worry about the current trend in which their affordable, independent sources of anything resembling “hard news” are drying up.
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