Almost ten years ago, I gave a speech to the Inland Press Association about the Future of the Newspaper Business. The folks in my audience were facing great changes.
For a very long time, having the newspaper franchise in a city or town was a pretty sure ticket to power, influence, and riches. You didn't have to that great a job. Just having the newspaper was enough.
That began to change in the latter half of the 20th Century. In 1964, eighty percent of American adults read a newspaper every day. By the mid-nineties, that figure had fallen below sixty percent and was still dropping.
Part of the reason was a change in lifestyle. Part was increased competition from other media. Television had come to dominate Americans' news-gathering habits. Radio had reacted to the rise of television by developing specific formats, including all-news.
Then cable and satellite TV brought more and more options that competed for attention. CNN became the first all-news channel, covering stories in real time. In the early nineties the Internet arrived.
One of the big brain thinkers who pondered what this might mean was Nicholas Negroponte of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1995, he published a book called Being Digital. One of the things he talked about in that book was how technology would transform the way people got their news.
Negroponte felt that pretty soon we would all have personal software that would go out and scour the Net for news of interest from thousands of sources. Here is what he had to say.
"Imagine a future in which your interface agent can read every news wire and newspaper and catch every TV and radio broadcast on the planet, and then construct a personalized summary. This kind of newspaper is printed in an edition of one."
Negroponte called this the "Daily Me." The concept scared many of the newspaper owners in my audience to death.
After all, why would people even need a newspaper if they could just get content for free from the Internet? Not all of them were scared, though. There were lots of skeptics, too.
Most of the skeptics took the position that there would still be a need for editors to sort through things, check sources, and select the important stories. That, they felt, would secure the future of newspapers. The Daily Me and its software would never replace a human editor.
Just last week, the Project for Excellence in Journalism released a study called, "The State of the News Media in 2004." The study talks about a lot of things, and a lot of media beyond newspapers, but many of the arguments that we heard back in the mid-nineties are still making their appearances.
According to the study, eighty-three percent of Americans prefer TV as their primary source of news, while forty-two percent prefer printed newspapers and fifteen percent prefer online sources. That online preference figure depends a little bit on how you ask your question. Different surveys get slightly different answers.
They all seem to agree, though, that online news is an increasingly important part of how people gather news and that the Daily Me that Nicholas Negroponte foresaw hasn't come to pass. Or has it?
This study, like many others, misses some key understanding about how people gather and use news because the study deals with the different media as if they were entirely separate choices. They're not, in two important ways.
Most outlets, whether print, online or electronic, get their news from the same sources and don't modify it much. In last week's study for example, researchers found that close to half of all articles appearing on news Web sites were "wire stories posted without any editing and produced by other sources."
The more important way that news media are linked, though, is in the mind of the news consumer. Most of the people that I know do not use newspapers in preference to the Net, for example. Instead they use both. Most of us use a mix of media to satisfy our news cravings.
For routine news gathering, we usually have a preferred mix and sequence. I turn on CNN in the morning to catch the day's "big stories" while I'm doing other things. Then I do my morning news scan of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, and Google News. I check those sources online.
Other folks may do it differently. They may listen to a news station on the radio while they drive to work. They may read a printed newspaper. Whatever they do, most folks use more than one news source as part of routine news gathering. Sometimes, though, things aren't routine.
When things aren't routine, the first component of news gathering is alert. With cable news channels as ubiquitous as they are, that first alert might be a breaking news announcement on CNN, Headline News, Fox, or MSNBC.
Or the alert might be a breaking news story on the radio. It might be an email alert delivered to an email box, a pager, or a cell phone.
If the alert is about a story that's important enough to us, we usually stop what we're doing and shift into news gathering mode. If a television is available we'll often start with television coverage. If it's not available, but the Net is, we'll check news Web sites.
When we want to know more, we go to mix of other news outlets. Since printed news doesn't handle breaking stories well, (the day of the Extra is gone), we save that for the next day. That illustrates one of two problems that printed newspapers have in the Digital Age.
This is the age of news-as-it-happens. The production of a printed newspaper simply can't keep up. That means there is only one safe competitive position for a printed paper. That is to provide in-depth coverage that can illuminate other media's breaking news coverage when people are ready to read.
That's true for the paper, but not for the organization that owns the paper. That organization can supplement coming print coverage with online publication of "stories in progress." It can go online with local angles on big national and international stories.
Print newspapers have another problem, too. The other one derives from the medium itself and from economics.
Newspapers have been published since the early 17th Century; and from the very beginning, they were limited by their physical characteristics. The simple economics of having to buy paper and ink will limit the amount of news that turns out to be "fit to print."
So most newspapers print the stories that will have interest to the most people. There's not enough paper or enough reporters to stuff the paper with everything that everybody is interested in. Woe to you, oh reader, if you are a cricket fan in the United States. You won't be getting the news of that sport from your local paper.
Where will you turn for that news? Mostly likely to specialty print publications and, increasingly, to online sources. There's lots of cricket coverage on the Web and the same is true for motor sports or gardening, rock climbing, or Japanese wood block prints or just about anything else you're interested in.
I have one other bone to pick with this survey and many others. They often don't pay attention to what we've learned about how people actually use the Net to gather information.
If you know that the average New York Times reader visits the site about six times a month and spends less than thirty-five minutes all told on the site during the month, but that the average newspaper reader picks up a paper about fifteen times a month and spends about half an hour with it each time, you might conclude that there is a more incredible difference in reading time between the two media than there actually is.
Usability studies would beg to differ. The fact is that most people - at least most people over the age of about thirty - don't read much online. They go online to scan for what interests them, find articles they like, and then print those articles for reading later.
That's probably what's happening at the Times and at other news Web sites. People are spending more time with the material from the Times site than the time they spend on the site itself. Back in the nineties we didn't know enough about how folks would use the Net to really understand how folks might use the Net for News. Now we do.
The folks in the mid-nineties who thought that the Net would have no real impact on local newspapers have turned out to be wrong. So have the folks who figured that the Net would take over.
The technology pundits and forecasters imagined that technology would be pulling together customized newspapers for us and delivering it in a newspaper-like format to a special printed outlet. That hasn't happened.
What's happened instead is that people have started using the Net to get their own mix of news and interesting information. We gather news from multiple sources.
We take in some of it from television and some of it through the ear, and some of it from the newspaper, and some of it online. With more sources available to us, we tend to mix our usage up, based on our interests.
Some folks who watch CNN or a network news show in the evening, for example, might swing next to the Home and Garden channel, or the History channel, or to a basketball game. Others might get up, head to the computer, and search for more in-depth information on a story that was in the news, or maybe a recipe for an upcoming dinner.
Intelligent agents of the technology kind, aren't doing this. The intelligent agents we call human beings are. Organizations that produce and distribute news in all its forms haven't figured out quite what to do about that yet. The ones who insist on looking at individual media usage or reading patterns instead of at the news gather process use will never figure it out.
Someone will figure it out, though. There's a lot of incentive. The news outlet or techno-tool that helps us do better what we want to do will be successful. While we're waiting we'll each put together our own version of the "Daily Me" from the sources and with the tools available.
