Good Riddance to Print

Ezra Klein shrugs at the decline of the traditional American daily:

Newspapers currently expend a fair number of resources doing certain things very poorly, or replicating the efforts of other organizations. That was fine when the information junkie had few alternatives. It’s less so when the world offers limitless avenues for data accumulation.

But all this really means is that newspapers will begin following magazines and specialty newspapers (like The Wall Street Journal) and seeking to make themselves indispensable to certain audiences. Some of those audiences may be ideological, and you’ll see campaigning newspapers akin to the British Guardian or Fox News. Some will be professional, and you’ll see dedicated foreign bureaus that do nothing save in-depth reporting on global issues, in much the way National Journal does for Congress. All will be, in their way, more relevant. The bloodless, fearful paradigm of “objective” reporting has alienated all while informing none, and it will likely come to a close.

As for the civic space supposedly provided by newsprint, that’s always struck me as wildly overblown. The involvement and interactivity offered by blogs and Craigslist and their kin dwarf the paltry opportunities of Letters to the Editor page. Newspapers have long upheld that they’re some sort of portal to community engagement, but does the metro section of the Washington Post really knit the community more tightly than Craigslist’s Rants and Raves, or Tyler’s ethnic dining guide, or DCist, or…?

Quite so. I subscribed to my hometown paper during my first few months here in Saint Louis, but I unsubscribed when I realized that I almost never read it, and felt like I was doing chores when I did. The medium-sized metropolitan dailies are a throwback to the 20th century, and as far as I can see, they’re coasting almost entirely on the inertia of older readers who continue reading them out of habit. When I picked up my morning paper, I was struck by how old and shallow the news I found there was. With Google News, I get fresh news just minutes after it happens, and if I’m particularly interested in a story, I can skim reports from a dozen different news outlets. In contrast, the average story describes events that happened 24 hours ago, and it tends to do so in the most cursory format.

My one quibble is that Ezra seems to be overestimating the percentage of those niche publications that will be printed. Paper is an incredibly cumbersome medium for time-sensitive information. It continues to have relevance because the world is run by people in their 40s, 50s, and 60s, most of whom read newspapers and magazines out of deeply ingrained habits. I think that as our generation–and especially the generation in school now–becomes older and more prominent, the decline of the traditional newspaper will accelerate.

I think the same is going to happen with magazines. As much as I love Reason, I’ve fallen way behind on reading my print subscription to that, too. The magazine is filled with stories about things that happened two months ago. Why would I want to read those, when I can read commentary about things that happened in the last few days on the website.

So I think he’s absolutely right that we’ll see an explosion of niche publications that offer in-depth analysis for people with an intensive interest in a particular subject. But as more readers get used to the web, I don’t see why these niche publications would bother with the expensive, labor-intensive, and slow process of putting their writings on newsprint and shipping the newsprint around the country (or, increasingly, the world).

(And just to anticipate an objection, I think books are an entirely different story. I predicts that books will be with us a lot longer than newspapers or magazines will)

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