It’s not newspapers’ fault, Slate writer says

In a recent column headlined “What’s Really Killing Newspapers,” Slate.com’s media writer, Jack Shafer, blames a changing world, not journalism, for the ailing health of newspapers. The newspaper once was an ATM machine for owners because it provided people with the social currency needed to build relationships, lubricate conversations and generally appear well informed.

Here’s one graf Shafer wrote that I especially liked:

The social networking that takes place via instant messaging, microblogging, or e-mail further steals from newspapers the mindshare they once owned. You no longer need to rely on a paper for the social currency that a weather report, movie listings, classified ads, shopping bargains, sports info, stock listings, television listings, gossip, or entertainment news provide.

Sure, more people have more places to go to get their hit. While I do appreciate Shafer’s point, I do think newspapers have contributed a great deal to their present woes: a failure to invest a decade ago in creating innovative products and new streams of revenue (hello, Kaplan?), a sluggish improvement in diversifying their newsrooms and story-mix to appeal to a wider audience (most newsrooms are still overwhelmingly white), and owners’ greed in maximizing profits (which once rivaled those of pharmaceutical companies) at the expense of investing in staff and training (one of the lowest rates among all industries). 

Reporters, designers, photographers, and a few editors are paying the price now for those bad business decisions by executives. As I’ve written here before, last year was perhaps the worst in recent memory for layoffs of journalists. I fear we are poorer as a profession from losing so much talent so quickly.

Some papers will survive this period, but there will be some that do not. We are still in the early phase of a massive shift in advertising dollars to other media platforms, such as Facebook, e-mail and mobile. Ad revenue for newspapers will continue to decline, but it’s hard to say if and when the ad revenue will totally disappear. The truth is that advertisers covet a wrapper that people want to read.