On New Media and Journalism: How the Coming Newspaper Industry Collapse Will Reinvigorate Journalism

"New competition from Web 2.0 companies along with continuing demographic shifts are about to send metropolitan daily newspapers into a spiral of decline from which few will emerge intact. Why now? People have been wrongly forecasting the death of newspapers for years. Why is this time different?"

This essay outlines the "near-total collapse of the American newspaper industry as we know it", which author Paul Gillin claims is an inevitable yet exciting part of the industry's process of reinventing itself. He here traces various trends in the printed medium of sharing news and information, contending that the business model of metropolitan daily newspapers is "poised for a collapse that will be stunning in its speed and scope. The cause is Web 2.0 and the vastly superior economics of that emerging business."

Namely, Gillin suggests that "the emerging economics of blogosphere" is a medium far more cost-efficient than what it will replace. He cites several examples of new media outlets - e.g., websites or weblogs - some with very small staffs who keep their overhead low by outsourcing editorial content, circulation, production, and sales ("marketing and promotion aren't even done"). According to the author, this model is "so compelling that it will almost completely upend the existing mainstream media model."

As the author explains - compared with 5 years ago - it is now "easy" for individuals to create Web content. Computing power, storage and bandwidth costs are declining rapidly; the open-source software movement has dropped the price of software; and search engines have become an effective marketing channel. Combining these technological advances with the fact that the new generation of Web-savvy consumers does not have the loyalty to established media (e.g., newspapers) that their elders do...for Gillin, these patterns lead to the prediction that "[i]n 10 years, probably a third of metropolitan daily print newspapers will be gone."

Gillin stresses that the "sole advantage" that printed newspapers still have is a reach in local markets, but counters this with the observation that, as the cost of publishing falls precipitously and citizens become more comfortable with the tools of publishing, thousands of mini e-newspapers will form around different geographies and topics. Aggregation websites, he claims, will emerge to sift through and organise the reports and conversations going on in these small communities: "Many of these sites will involve human editors who understand the needs of their audience and monitor online activity on their behalf." Gillin cites several examples of new models being tested at community journalism sites, promising that "[m]ore will follow. Many more."

Gillin argues that "print newspapers are modeled on assumptions that were defined by physical constraints, but which are outmoded and irrelevant online" and yet celebrates the fact that "what emerges from the rubble of the newspaper industry will be a fresh, vibrant and very different kind of journalism....[I]t will ultimately be an evolution of the profession into something that is richer, more inclusive and much more dynamic than anything we have ever known." He observes that the editor's role, while still critical, will increasingly involve assembling and organising information for readers who have limited access to the internet. He also speculates that the craft of reporting will become faster and more iterative.

The author acknowledges that this new model "will be very disruptive and very controversial. The idea that a news organization would publish information it did not know to be true flies in the face of all of our expectations. The concept of actively involving readers - who have no formal relationship with the news organization - in the reporting process will be too much for some editors to accept." Despite these reservations, Gillin argues here that a "complete rebirth of journalism around the concept that information is plentiful and cheap" is on the horizon - at least in the United States.