If you followed much of the media’s explanation for why newspapers are failing, you would conclude that it’s because fewer people are buying newspapers.

But that is not the fundamental problem for newspapers. The problem is that advertisers—not readers—are deserting newspapers. And it is advertisers, not readers, who have always paid the expensive cost of newspaper journalism.

The elusive truth about the demise of newspapers is contained in a fascinating (and very long)  essay by US media critic Bill Wyman (published online of course, Five key reasons why newspapers are failing). In it he reveals the essential truth about newspapers that journalists find so difficult either to comprehend or explain:

The problem of the daily press in the US is exclusively this: the collapse of its business model. That model used to be, plainly put, making money—a lot of money, oceans of money—delivering advertising on newsprint into peoples’ homes. Subscribers didn’t pay for news. Advertisers did.

Why are journalists so bad at understanding their own demise? Wyman’s explanation is both fascinating and plausible:

Journalists are pretty good at working the scene of a disaster. They’ll tell you what happened, who did it, and why.

It could have been brought on by delicacy, perhaps romanticism. And since it is not just any crisis, but a definitive one—one that seems to mean an end to the physical papers’ role in American life as we have come to know it—perhaps there’s a little bit of shell-shock in the mix as well.

As an investigative journalist somewhere discovers every day of the week, the real story is buried inside the superficial story. In the case of the collapse of newspapers, it’s about time the real story was told.

Meanwhile: There was a fascinating debate on Traditional Media v the Blogosphere on Radio National’s wonderful Philosopher’s Zone yesterday:

An excerpt:

David Cody: Well I think that’s a very good analogy in many ways. One of the dangers of economic markets of course is that they lead to monopolies, or they can and have in many cases led to monopolies, and I think in the media landscape that’s precisely what we see all around us. And one of the great things about the blogosphere is that it gives the potential to break those monopolies down and diversify the actual voices out there, and actually increase competition, because of course just leaving things alone, not having a regulator, doesn’t guarantee on its own competition, but the internet is a form which is very hard for anyone to monopolise.

One of the I think analogies which are pertinent here, the situation we’re in at the moment is not unlike the situation in 15th century Europe shortly after the invention of the printing press, and then as now, there were an awful lot of people who were concerned that the printing press was a terrible thing because people would have access to all this information they didn’t have before, that was much more constrained beforehand, they could only read manuscripts. And there were an awful lot of people who tried to get them banned or at least licenced. The Vatican attempted to have the printing presses licenced, because you see people in the 15th century arguing this with a quite straight face, which seems hard to believe now that with all that extra information, there’ll be falsehoods and people will believe falsehoods that they otherwise wouldn’t believe, and they need to be protected from this. And those arguments look extraordinarily quaint from our perspective, and not to say ridiculous, and I think people will look back on this era and these kinds of arguments against the blogosphere in another similar life.

Read the full, fascinating interview HERE (or listen)

ERIC BEECHER Crikey Publisher
For a group whose role it is to tell people what’s really going on, journalists are doing an appalling job in explaining why newspapers are in so much trouble.