News print need to morph to stay relevant

Newspapers are morphing.

No, you read that correctly. It says “morphing,” not “dying.” And here’s why.

Newspapers are still an attractive medium for consumers. Its easily portable, easy to share, you can tuck in a coat pocket, you don’t need batteries or a stable internet connection to enjoy the content and it comes back in a day or two with new content.

Except… that content isn’t new. You’ve seen it before on the web.

As part of my duties preparing the podcast What’s New in News, I cruise through a lot of articles on the news industry. Every week there are articles demeaning the death of newspapers, how with newspapers we will see the death of journalism, and how American civilization will effectively cease without paying a buck for the print edition of a news group’s product? Please. Newspapers are unattractive to people because they don’t have anything in them that attracts people to them.

Think about it. The news section has what? Stories about what happened yesterday. Forget radio and TV news scooping those stories earlier, you can now read about those stories as the reporters are figuring it out, thanks to technologies such as blogs, Twitter and live webcasts.

What about sports? You can get that content online as well. How about Arts & Entertainment? Again, online. TV listings can now be interactive, with you selecting your favorite channels for listings online, and being able to set your DVR to record them, right over the internet. Can’t do that in print. You can read the funnies online, and get a wider range of them as well. (Mary Worth and Pearls Before Swine would make strange bedfellows in print, but read together seamlessly online.)

So how can I say newspapers are not dying? I didn’t. I said they are morphing. There is a slight difference.

When television became popular decades ago, radio went through a violent shift in content. No longer did people want to listen to Burns & Allen, they wanted to see them. News has since left the radio dial as well, with dedicated radio newsrooms being about as rare as a working telegraph. (When was the last time you met a dozen or more radio journalists?) Radio went from being a place for escapism and news to transforming into a triple threat of talk radio, sports, and music.

Radio went through a very tough transformation. It still exists. Being readily available in cars, homes, offices, MP3 players and clock radios, many people still listen to the radio. Megalith corporations and their fiscal mismanagement have endangered many of these stations. Currently, I think that is more of the business end’s problem than the consumer’s.

So how do we translate this into a survival tale for newspapers? To be honest, I’m not quite sure. Is it dropping all national content and becoming a community newspaper? Is it that, plus all state content from a shared co-op wire service? Could be. Could not be. The future of newspapers may be something we have yet to see enter the mainstream.

But as long as newspapers charge for money, people will demand content that is worth their dollar. It will take some true innovators and some really brave publishers to make that happen. Until then, newspapers may continue to see operations fold all across the nation, blaming the internet for their failure to innovate and stay relevant.