How the media industry continues to lose its future
If Roger Fidler’s career has any meaning, it is this: sometimes you see the future coming, but you still get trampled by it.
Thirty years ago, Mr. Fidler was a media executive who offered a reassuring vision of the future of newspapers. The digital revolution would free news from the printing presses, giving people portable devices that would keep them informed all day long. Some stories would be enhanced by video, others by sound and animation. Readers can share articles, encouraging engagement across communities.
That all kind of happened. Everyone is online all the time and almost everyone seems interested, if not obsessed, with national and global events. But the traditional media that Mr. Fidler championed is not benefiting much. After decades of decline, their collapse appears to be accelerating.
Every day brings bad news. Sometimes these are recently founded digital companies, sometimes they are venerable publications with a history dating back more than a century.
Cuts have just been announced at Law360, The Intercept and the youth-focused video site NowThis, which has laid off half its staff. The tech news site Engadget, which extensively tracks layoffs in the tech field, has laid off its top editors and other staff members. Condé Nast and Time are laying off employees. The survival of Vice Media, once valued at $5.7 billion, and Sports Illustrated, in another era the most influential sports publication, is uncertain. The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post have jointly eliminated hundreds of journalists. One in four newspapers which existed in 2005 no longer exists.
The slow crash of newspapers and magazines would be of limited importance except for one thing: traditional media had, at its core, the lofty and difficult mission of communicating information about the world. From investigative reports on government to coverage of local politicians, the news made all the institutions and individuals covered become a little more transparent and possibly more honest.
The advice columns, movie reviews, recipes, stock market data, weather reports and just about everything else in newspapers could easily be posted online – except the news itself. Local and regional reporting had difficulty presenting itself as a paying proposition.
Now there are signs that the whole concept of ‘news’ is fading. When asked where they get their local news, almost as many respondents to a Gallup poll said social media as mentioned newspapers and magazines. A recent effort to give people free subscriptions to their local newspapers in Pennsylvania as part of an academic study attracted virtually no customers.
“Soon after the advent of the printing press in the 15th century, monastery scriptoriums for copying manuscripts began to close rapidly,” says Mr. Fidler, now 81 and retired in Santa Fe, NM. “I’m not very optimistic about the survival of the majority of newspapers in the United States.”
The demise of the news media has been accompanied by the disintegration of American society, which is now as angry and divided as it has been since the height of the Vietnam War and civil rights protests more than half a century ago. As the media dropped, the noise level rose.
Maybe it could have been different. Contrary to the myth that all newspaper magnates of the 1980s and 1990s thought the good times would last forever, quite a few newspaper magnates saw trouble lurking in the distance.
Mr. Fidler spent 21 years at Knight Ridder, a newspaper chain that had major metro newspapers in cities such as Miami and San Jose, California. An early project was Viewtron, an effort to put terminals in people’s homes that would deliver news, shopping and chat. . It yielded too little and cost too much. In 1986, Viewtron was closed.
What Mr. Fidler took away from Viewtron’s failure was that newspaper readers needed something that looked like a newspaper and that didn’t pinch their pockets. He helped develop technology for lightweight tablets that would use flat panel displays that were cheap, but crisp and clear and with relatively long battery life.
Such exhibitions did not exist in the early 1990s, but were promised by the end of the decade. The newspaper would be broadcast via high-speed digital telephone networks or direct satellite broadcasts. “I think this will be the salvation for the traditional serious newspapers,” Thomas Winship, the longtime editor of The Boston Globe, told the New York Times in a 1992 profile of Mr. Fidler.
Although at least some publishers were convinced, tablets never came to save newspapers. One problem was that there was no consensus on a software standard. Tablets only became viable when Apple introduced the iPad in 2010. But the real problem for the news industry was the rise of a devastating and unforeseen competitor: the Internet.
“I was too narrowly focused,” Mr. Fidler admitted.
The Internet would first create an alternative to printed newspapers and magazines, then become a competitor and ultimately destroy many of them. “I have not taken into account all the possible cross-effects of emerging technologies that would lead to Craigslist, alternative news sites, social media and other products that would significantly reduce newspaper circulation and advertising revenue,” Mr. Fidler said.
Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web in 1989 as a tool for collaboration and information sharing. Because it was amorphous and infinitely flexible, it allowed for slow adapters and fast adapters at the same time, circumventing the kind of hand-holding for readers that Mr. Fidler deemed necessary. Newspapers lost their classified ads to the Internet almost immediately. Display ads stuck around, but Google and Facebook, and later Amazon, took over that market.
By essentially making every voice heard at the same volume, the Internet encouraged publishers to join the party. Newspapers and magazines simply gave away what they paid for in physical form. They were pushed by Silicon Valley, which needed high-quality content to keep people online and using its technology.
“Publishers have been led to believe that content is a commodity and should be available everywhere for free,” Mr. Fidler said. It took years to establish paywalls, and at that point many publications were fatally weakened.
The good old days weren’t so good
For all the gloom in which the media wallows, the situation is contradictory.
Reliable local reporting is scarce or non-existent in many places. But there is also a much greater variety of foreign, national and cultural news available online than previous generations could get in print. For all the celebrations of the past, if you were in a city with a mediocre newspaper – and there were many – access to quality journalism was difficult.
“In principle, the world has opened up for us. There is so much good journalism out there,” said David Mindich, professor of journalism at Temple University’s Klein College of Media and Communication. “If you had said to me 20 years ago, ‘I see a generation listening to long audio shows,’ I would have said, ‘Attention spans are getting shorter. I don’t think that’s going to happen.’ But that did happen.”
Most long-form audio shows, even at their best, are not news in the way that, say, a zoning committee report is news. The erosion of the idea of news can be seen even more vividly in the magazine world. Where the purpose was to inform, it is now to entertain.
“Time magazine just chose Taylor Swift as its person of the year,” said Samir Husni, a veteran magazine analyst. “Elvis or the Beatles were never chosen. She was the first entertainer. Journalism is increasingly more about marketing than truth, because we depend on the price the customer pays instead of advertising.”
This is how digital has changed journalism, he said: “It’s now about making everyone happy. But that was never the role of journalism, to make people happy.”
Marc Benioff, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur who bought struggling Time with his wife Lynne in 2018, looked at Ms. Swift’s selection differently: “Best-selling song of all time!” (At least in recent years.) A few weeks after the Swift issue came out, Time’s union said 15 percent of the magazine’s unionized editorial staff were getting the axe.
That was more of a strategic move than a sign of distress, Mr. Benioff said.
“If you want these media companies to work, you have to change the product mix, which also means you have to shift the employee mix,” he texted. The paywall, which was introduced in 2011, was scrapped last year. As a brand, Time needs the widest possible exposure.
Two years ago, Mr. Benioff told Axios that Time’s revenue would increase by 30 percent to $200 million by 2022. That might have been ambitious. “Sales by 2024 should reach $200 million, a new high,” he says now. “We’ll even make money.”
Other publications are trying to take the profit motive out of journalism.
Nonprofit news ventures tend to be small, unobtrusive, and unevenly distributed across regions. But there are many signs of growth. The number of outfits serving communities of color — never very well served by traditional publications — has doubled in the past five years, according to the Institute for Nonprofit News.
Readers generally respond too.
“People talk about nonprofit reporting in their communities as if it is a normal part of the news ecosystem, and not as if it is an outside force,” says Magda Konieczna, author of “Journalism Without Profit: Making News When the Market Fails.” In some places the effect is striking. “Philadelphia is now a news jungle instead of a news desert.”
Ms. Konieczna teaches at Concordia University in Montreal. A few weeks ago, Canadian news giant Bell Media announced it would cut hundreds of jobs and end many of its television news broadcasts. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the decision “erodes our democracy.”
“My neighbors read The New Yorker but don’t know where to find local news or why they would want to, largely because it doesn’t really exist,” Ms. Konieczna said. “This is the dystopian future.”
The New Yorker employed AJ Liebling, the greatest press critic of the post-war years. He called himself an optimist, despite seeing a downward trend since he became a reporter in 1925.
“The function of the press in society is to inform, but its role is to make money,” he wrote. The more she did the latter, he argued, the less she concerned herself with the former.
There was no golden age, but Roger Fidler is still inconsolable. He long ago outlived Knight Ridder, which was sold in 2006 to McClatchy, another chain. McClatchy went bankrupt in 2020. He spends a few hours every day reading the news in the print edition of a community newspaper and the digital editions of national newspapers. and regional newspapers. It’s a lot, and yet not enough.
“Social media and the comments on it overwhelmed us,” he said. “We are inundated with information because everyone is a journalist. Everyone thinks they have the truth. Everyone certainly has an opinion. It’s disheartening to see how it went.”