Huffpo's Lerer on the 'New and Better' Journalism

Huffington Post co-founder and chairman Kenneth Lerer delivered a talk to students at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism last night. Portfolio.com's Alexandra Fenwick, a student at the school, was there. Here's her report.

HuffPo co-founder Ken Lerer says that newspaper publishers will be making a "huge mistake" if they put up pay walls around their content, but concedes that mass layoffs are "inevitable" in the journalism of the future, which he decrees will be lived online.

Lerer told journalists to stop whining and get with the digital revolution already at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism last night, where he delivered the school's annual Hearst New Media Lecture to a chorus of real-time Tweets accompanying a simultaneous live-video feed of his speech.

While Huffpo and its ilk have recently inherited the mantle from Craigslist as the villains responsible for the death of newspapers, and the AP has promised to sue aggregators that don't pay its fees (Huffpo pays) Lerer brought good tidings for journalism, if not so much for journalists.

"Anyone who whispers or says out loud that the future of journalism is in doubt could not be more wrong," he said. With more consumers of news than ever before, journalism is not in jeopardy but in transition to a "new and better place," he said. (Like heaven, maybe? That's where dead things go, right?)

But, in response to a Columbia alum and current Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter who mused on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's decision to stop its presses and migrate to a web-only edition that only requires 20 of the 165 reporters it once employed, Lerer had a less rosy outlook.

"It is inevitable there are going to be a lot of unemployed newspaper reporters," he said.

Lerer, a past Executive Vice President of AOL Time Warner and the father of Thrillist.com Web entrepreneur Ben Lerer, taught an entrepreneurship class to journalism students as the school's Hearst New Media Professional-in-Residence this year. His lecture, entitled "How We Got Here and How We Get Out of Here," was the culmination of his year's worth of lessons. With it, Lerer joined a pantheon of eminent Hearst New Media lecturers including The New York Times' first public editor, Daniel Okrent, who spoke about the death of print waaay before it was fashionable, back in 1999, and Slate's Jack Shafer, who spoke in 2004 and recently told journalists to stop getting huffy about HuffPo's method of "lifting stories."

After an announcement from dean of student affairs, Sree Sreenivasan, that the school will change the name of its new media program to "digital journalism" because, "after 15 years it's not new media anymore," and another news tidbit with the introduction of News.com founder and former CNET.com editor-in-chief Jai Singh as the new managing editor of the Huffington Post, Lerer launched into an analysis of why newspapers have gotten the dots knocked off their i's in recent years. Along the way he contemplated what he would do if he were in various roles including dean of the school, a blogger, publisher of Time magazine and a newspaper owner, all of which boiled down to the lesson that resistance is futile.

"Embrace disruptive innovation," Lerer said. "Continuing to resist it is to fail to comprehend what has happened in the past 10 years."

Of the four reasons Lerer listed for newspapers' death spiral, the concept of the "the innovator's dilemma," a phenomenon chronicled in a 1997 book of the same name by Clayton Christensen was the most insightful. In this scenario, Lerer explained, good companies are always doomed to fail by virtue of the same success that made them good in the first place. Nobody was clamoring for Internet coverage 10 years ago, Lerer said, so newspapers focused on getting the print edition right. Today's it's too late to own the Internet, too. So in order to survive, a company must know what its customers want before they know it themselves. No sweat, right? Print newspapers' problem is that they were too successful at being newspapers, and got complacent. To stay alive, online newspapers have to think of themselves as technology companies as well as media companies, Lerer said.

He then floated the various ideas for reviving newspapers' business model, dismissing most of them in the same breath. Lerer isn't a fan of building walled gardens and charging for stories, establishing a middleman to pay for all access to online content, offering tax subsidies for newspaper subscribers, micropayments for stories like songs for iTunes or a bailout for newspapers that would allow them to apply for nonprofit status with a variety of tax breaks.

He seemed more jazzed about the following ideas:

- Hyper-specialization. According to this theory, ten million subject-specific blogs are better than one general interest newspaper.

- Investigative funds to finance in-depth open-source investigative reporting. For example, ProPublica or micro-financed Spot Journalism or, oh, the one that HuffPo recently launched.

- Newspapers as aggregators. Instead of reporting news, publications would find the best stories across the Web and offer their seal of approval.

- Focus on analysis, not newsgathering. The theory behind this one is that there's so much information out there, not every paper needs to write its own version of the same story.

- Close down the presses today. It costs The New York Times twice as much to print and deliver the paper each year as it would to buy a Kindle for every customer, Lerer pointed out.

Instead of fearing the future online, journalists, especially those just starting out, should embrace it, Lerer said. Before going to the business side of media, he was a writer, himself, freelancing stories for the Village Voice and New York magazine but gave it up when he couldn't make ends meet. If he'd had the platform that blogs now provide he might have made it as a writer, he surmised.

"I was dying. What was I getting paid? $200 for a piece in the Village Voice, and there was nowhere I could go." he said. "Today I could do so much more it's not even funny -- I really could write and get it out there and show people how good or bad I was."

As it is, he doesn't much like blogging.

"I've tried it once or twice and I got some negative comments and I didn't like it. I get hurt feelings very easily as my family will tell you," he said.

That became apparent as he dodged a series of questions that followed, included one that was Twittered in, asking whether it was correct to conclude that only entrepreneurial journalists and hobbyists who don't need to rely on their writing for an income could survive in the landscape Lerer had described.

"That person made that up, I didn't say either of those things. He's not listening because he's not here," Lerer said, dismissing the question as the audience laughed." "No one in this room thinks I said that. Next question."

Lest anyone needed reminding that Lerer became not a writer in the end, but a businessman, and a very successful one at that, that reply did the trick. It was clear his patience for debating the future of journalism had run out, because for him, there's no debate. His closing remarks took on a similarly adamant, somewhat bullying but always businesslike quit-messing-around-and-get-down-to-brass-tacks tone. He marveled that 30 years ago it took 30 years to build a brand but that it can be done online practically overnight today, in just a year, and urged brands to get building.

"If you start, it happens so much faster than you could imagine, it's spectacular," Lerer said. "And if you don't, it will never happen. Stop arguing and just do it. It's the bottom line."