Vanity Fair: Has the Washington Post Lost Its Way?

Happens to all of us. Cheers.

 

As a 24-year old, I can assure you that no one my age or younger reads the physical newspaper. The very concept is ridiculous: I can turn on my phone or open a laptop and read the most up-to-date information or I can walk to a Starbucks or a Tom Thumb and read something that's already out of date.

If you're looking for a future for local online news, look at ESPN Dallas. A good majority of them were hired over from the Dallas Morning News. I doubt any would go back.

 

There are still tens of millions who read newspapers. I bet at least one person your age or younger reads them. I betcha, tho, that very few people with their phone or laptop are using it for news.

 

That's the key distinction. I know many young people who read newspapers to be more informed or to kill time on the train or to occupy them on the shitter or to enjoy a good feature story. I don't know any who pick up the paper and say, "Hey, my alma mater won yesterday!"

They're reading for news, but they're not reading for the news they care most about. I imagine the percentage of people who pick up The New York Times and read about Syria is significantly higher than the people who go to NYTimes.com and read about Syria.

 

Maybe, but with how cheap smart phones are getting, "very few" of "nearly everyone" is still an awful lot of people.

 

I'd say the big difference in terms of what people read online and what they used to read in the paper is that there is less browsing for information. The reader generally knows what they want and they're just looking for the best place to find it. I might go to the New York Times for national news, but for the other sections, why wouldn't I just go to SI for sports, TMZ for entertainment, the Atlantic for editorial/long-form writing etc. (Just to choose three examples)

The business model of having a bunch of generalists cover a lot of different types of stories doesn't make all that much sense in the more specialized internet world.

 

I think the era of switching reporters' beats every few years is over. But name one newspaper that does that consistently to this day? If you want the expert on the Indianapolis City Council, you need to go to The Indianapolis Star. If you want the expert on Portland eateries, check The Oregonian. If you want the expert on the Washington Redskins, the first place to look should be The Washington Post.

Newspapers need to sell their expertise. And they have years and years of expertise that few places can match.

 

I think the next logical step is then, if you're an expert on Portland eateries, and there's a market for your talents, the end goal is selling yourself directly to the consumer and remove the intermediary of the newspaper.

A good example of this is Joe Sheehan, who used to be at Baseball Prospectus and now freelances at SI. He sells his newsletter for $30 annually and he has more than 1,000 subscribers.

Matt Yglesias from Slate is selling some 40-page article he wrote for $3 bucks on Kindle. I'm really curious to see what the market is for that.

 

But the generalization is not just a problem at the beat level. The cost of delivery is essentially 0 on the Internet--newspapers no longer sell based on their monopoly of delivery systems alone. Because of that, the bundle of information newspapers deliver no longer makes much sense--we've become disaggregated from the geographic constraints that used to limit the dissemination of information. I don't need to go to the local newspaper for TV reviews; I can go read Alan Sepinwall. I want to follow Michigan but don't live in the state; I can go to Brian Cook. Economics, Paul Krugman, and so on. The point is not that newspapers can't or don't employ these types of experts--Sepinwall and Krugman prove that--but rather that no newspaper needs and can employ all of them, and no reader wants them to. The cost of reaching readers has become so low that there's limited economies to scale--bundling the information based on geography alone no longer makes much sense. People care about interests, not location (although sometimes those will coincide). Newspapers, unfortunately, are built directly counter to a model that makes sense on the Internet.

 

To a lesser extent, both radio and television presented the same challenge to newspapers in terms of geography and content.

The difference this time around seems to be the internet's takeover of local revenue streams like classified advertising.

 

To a much, much, much lesser extent. The Internet offers low- to no-cost delivery of on-demand information. And even classifieds fits into the model I've suggested--the Internet makes it much easier to disaggregate those ads from other information one would delivery geographically and disaggregate different types of classifieds.

 

The other difference: When radio and television came around, newspapers shrugged and said, "OK, we'll just adjust a little bit of how we do our thing." When the Internet came around, newspapers made the decision (probably correctly, but it's debatable) to enter the field. That created all the problems that the thread about the Boston Courant brought up.