Newspapers' Real Problems

Newspapers aren't dying because of the Internet. Newspapers are dying because of two reasons that usually go unspoken: most newspapers suck, and almost all newspapers aim at the wrong audience. Throw in screw-ups like the Los Angeles Times' Tupac mess, and you get a train wreck.

The New Yorker has a lengthy story delving into why newspapers are dying. It names all the usual suspects -- Craigslist, Google, disinterest among the young to read anything on paper.

If those are the culprits, though, how do you explain the success of college newspapers? You'd think, since college kids are so wired, they'd rather pick up a cow pie than a printed paper. Yet a 2006 survey showed that 44% of college students read their campus paper twice or more a week -- a market penetration city newspapers only dream about. Advertising revenue for college papers increased 15% in 2007.

College newspapers are indispensable parts of their communities. They're written by students for students. They're often courageous, whether taking on the administration or running sex-advice columns. Most college papers have Web sites, but students still read the print version, actually enjoying a break from their computer screens.

So why can't city newspapers have that kind of success? Well, for one, outside of maybe the 10 biggest papers, they don't have the talent for it. Most city newspapers have seen their newsroom budgets squeezed tighter and tighter for the past decade or two. They're left with too few people. The salaries that newspapers pay, coupled with the conventional wisdom that the medium is dying, prevent them from luring or keeping the brightest newcomers. In short, newspaper companies have not seriously invested in improving and updating their product in years -- for the most part, not since the move to color.

With rare exception, newspapers are dull and bound to outdated traditions. (My old employer, USA Today, busted out of that container 25 years ago only by starting with a clean slate -- but then increasingly adopted newspaper traditions over these past 25 years.) In a Pew survey, less than 20% of journalists named the quality of coverage as something that journalism "is doing especially well these days." Along the way, newspapers portray themselves as purveyors of trusted professional news, and then suffer scandals, like the LA Times linking Sean Combs to Tupac Shakur's death based on false FBI documents. No wonder papers are losing customers.

And then, if you want to accept that younger people won't read a newspaper (which the success of college papers seems to counter), or if you want to accept that newspapers need to hold onto their traditions, then newspapers keep trying to win the wrong audience. They constantly talk about appealing to younger readers -- but they shouldn't. Newspapers might do better if they consciously play to older readers.

Surveys show a generation gap in the way people get news -- particularly national and international news. In one Pew survey, the median age of the three categories of news consumers least likely to turn to the Net is around 50. The information "omnivores," who use the Net for most everything, has a median age of 28.

Newspaper executives tend to covet a generation of readers they can't win while taking for granted the readers who could become loyal fans. It's completely backwards. Logic says that newspaper companies should give their customers what they want: aim the print product squarely at people, say, 40 and older, and aim the Web site at 40 and younger.

That could create some branding tensions. But what else are newspapers going to do? Everything they've tried over the past decade has not worked.