TIA,

Michael

But, I also agree taht the only way to save these daily periodicals is to have them remove the facade of being non-biased. Back in the early days of the United States newspapers were slanted. The Democrats put out their own local paper and the Whigs/Federalists/Repubicans put out their own. Major cities had many newspapers and each had a target audience. One aspect that these papers provided was a direct response to the other. So Publicus might publish an op-ed in the New York Herald and Cicero might publish a direct response to that editorial in the New York Times.

Add in the third party whackos and ethnic slants, we could return to the real glory days of newspapers.

Other pressures probably accelerated the decline: Strong labor unions kept wage costs high. Restrictions on media ownership prevented mergers.

Concentration down to a comparative handful of highly branded national newspapers seems like the only rational response. I’d imagine that the TV news media and print news media will eventually tie together. So, you’d have the Fox Wall Street Journal, the MSNBC Post, the CBS Times, etc.

Max

I think the only way for newspapers to save themselves is to openly declare their slants, and cater to that niche. This would be a way for more liberty-minded people to be heard — a libertarian paper could contract with guys like Austin Bay, Glenn Reynolds, Michael Yon, or Warren here to provide reporting, could pull analysis from willing bloggers, and could take advertisers geared to their niche.

But I don’t think it will actually happen.

The problem is that “Journalism” itself is a more or less dead field. Most “news” these days consists of slightly edited press releases. Investigative and editorial content is slanted to the point of being useless. Frankly, there’s nobody in the newspaper business (and very few in magazines) that I can take without a container-load of salt. And as long as I’m getting the news from people that I don’t completely trust (no offense), I might as well enjoy the blog community. The quality of information is about the same, the writing is often more entertaining, and we can praise or bitch at the writers as appropriate or as our moods dictate .

I’ve thought a lot about this, mostly from the perspective of my small city hometown (whose newspaper claims to be libertarian, btw).

I figure they do need to focus their reporters on local content and interest, in order to differentiate themselves from the internet and/or bigger Ohio papers. Then they need to find the cheapest source for state, national, interenational news.

Of course they do that to a large extent, but I don’t see much creativity from them as far as new content.

The Wash Post on-line has put out cars.com, an very solid job search section, and they own Kaplan test prep (I believe). Obviously this hasn’t saved the company entirely, but I think it has given them a shot at viability.

Seriously, though, the only niches I can see paper filling anymore are either hyperlocal reporting or delayed but highly in depth reporting. The drawback in the latter is that it is very expensive to do such work, it is the kind of reporting most subject to being slanted, and readers no longer appreciate being limited to one analysis. Therefore, the model for this could be to selectively, based on the anticipated interests of the target demographic – in fact, an open and explicit bias – present analysis from a variety of writers. The best source of that is now… online. In one sense, newspapers become “smart” and targeted aggregators of online content. They would compete on how effectively they strike the balance between bias and completeness.

My first paragraph was only half joking, this would turn the current relationship between print and internet inside out.