I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
Detroit’s newspapers: whose survival is at stake in these headlines? (photo: katherine of Chicago via Flickr.com)
The last few weeks have been unrelentingly bleak for newspapers. The Chicago Tribune has declared bankruptcy. The New York Times is mortgaging their building to raise cash. Hundreds of reporters and editors have been laid off by Gannett, Booth and other newspaper conglomerates. Closer to home, the Detroit News and Free Press are downsizing and will now only be printing and delivering papers three days a week. The Lansing State Journal is doing layoffs and buyouts.
Are we seeing the end of the era of the newspaper? And how did the business get to this point?
As James Surowiecki of the New Yorker noted recently, when the Chicago Tribune declared bankruptcy its owner said that the problems at his paper and the industry in general were the result of a “perfect storm” of factors — at a time when readers are increasingly getting their news from the internet, the current recession and resulting decrease in ad spending is a powerful double whammy driving newspapers into economic disaster. Surwiecki points to the internet as one nail in the coffin of the newspaper business:
Newspaper readership has been slowly dropping for decades—as a percentage of the population, newspapers have about half as many subscribers as they did four decades ago—but the Internet helped turn that slow puncture into a blowout. Papers now seem to be the equivalent of the railroads at the start of the twentieth century—a once-great business eclipsed by a new technology.
But as Felix Salmon, a finance writer for Conde Nast, points out, the real revenue source for newspapers has always been advertising rather than subscriptions:
There’s an old saying that you’ll never understand newspaper economics until you understand why newspaper vending machines are designed so that you can take as many papers as you like for your quarter. Newspapers are, first and last, devices for delivering ads to readers. It’s the ads which account for all the profits, not the cash coming from subscribers or people who buy their paper at the newsstand. Yes, news itself is free, nowadays. But it always has been. What we’ve been paying for all these years was never news, it was papers.
The advent of blogs and online news sites like this one has been hailed as the era of citizen journalism, a time when both news and commentary are generated by individuals and organizations directly, without the filter of the big media companies. Never before have there been so many sources of news and comment, which has surely contributed to the loss of readers for conventional newspapers.
The newspapers have had to play catch up, moving their content online and hoping to attract readers to their websites rather than to their vending machines. The problem is that online ads simply don’t pay the way print ads do, causing an enormous drop in revenue for the papers. As a result, some newspapers, including the Oakland Press, are now trying to adopt the citizen journalist formula. The Press announced that it will now be holding seminars for non-reporters to teach them how to generate their own content, with the hope of publishing the resulting work on their website.
For comment on these issues, we turned to Tony Collings, a former CNN correspondent who now teaches journalism at the University of Michigan, and Alan Fisk, a longtime newspaper reporter and editor who teaches journalism at Oakland University. Both Collings and Fisk formerly worked as mentors here at the Michigan Messenger, helping guide this online news outlet in our early days.
Fisk says that the move toward citizen journalism by the Oakland Press is purely a matter of economic necessity:
Saving money is obviously the biggest part of the reason for a shift to having the public produce much of the contents of local newspapers. It’s certainly not over any concerns about improving journalism and anyone who says so is being fatuous. Newspaper companies are desperately trying anything to survive in a very tough economic climate.
Collings, on the other hand, agrees that financial concerns may be driving this move but that it may have some positive effect:
It’s hard to know for sure the reason for the timing of this, since the idea of “citizen journalism” has been around for a long time, but I wouldn’t be surprised if at least part of the motivation by newspapers is to generate cheap content. They may be also hoping that citizens will discover news events that professional journalists might miss, especially if the citizens can capture images of it with cellphone cameras or other devices, the way subway passengers did in London during the terrorist attacks of July 2005.
But is this a good thing? Many in the mainstream media have long complained that the problem with citizen journalists is that they rarely have the training to do the job effectively. Fisk tends to agree with those criticisms:
Realistically, some readers may know more than reporters about what’s going on in their communities. But how many readers are trained enough to ferret out important stories and write about them cogently? Not many. And how can you trust the information provided by someone who cannot be held to any kind of standard for truth, objectivity and accuracy?
Collings says there are both pros and cons to the citizen journalist model:
Pros and cons of citizen journalists: On the pro side, they are cheap and may come across stories that professional journalists might miss, and might even provide scoops. Also on the pro side, anything that gets the public more involved with a news organization helps that news organization strengthen its ties with its readers so that it doesn’t lose that all-important connection. On the con side, there is the risk that “citizen journalists” will misreport events, especially complex, fast-developing stories that require caution, skepticism, and careful verification of allegations. Non-professionals might fail to ask all the tough questions of a source who is trying to get them to report something. There is the risk they could be duped or simply miss an important angle. And a “training course” for high school students and retirees might not be adequate for developing and honing the skills needed by a professional journalist. Also, there is the risk to the news organization that the person claiming to be a “citizen journalist” could have an ulterior motive to misrepresent the facts. For example, he or she could be an operative for a political party or cause, or for a corporation or union, or some other organization pursing its own agenda. And there is the danger that photos and videos can be doctored by someone who wants to fool the public.
But as the old saying goes, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Whether traditional journalists like it or not, citizen journalism is here to stay and has become increasingly dominant. And it may simply be too late to save newspapers at all. As Fisk notes, “What’s stunning about the collapse of the newspaper industry is the speed at which it is happening.”
The Michigan Messenger, it should perhaps be noted, is something of a hybrid between traditional and citizen journalism. Some of our staff came from the world of traditional journalism while some, like me, came from the blogging world. Our mentors and editors, however, all came from traditional print journalism. And importantly, we commit ourselves to following the ethical rules set out by the Society of Professional Journalists.
Rick Edmonds, a newspaper analyst for the Poyter Institute in Florida, a national organization that serves as a resource for reporters and editors, said of such hybrid publications, ”I dont know that there is an easy answer. The possibility exists that publications like yours will plug some of the gaps. And that is beginning to happen in many places in the country. Then there is kind of the question of whether mobilizing citizen reporting will work. I dont see that that works in a big way. With some regret I think that it [the old model of journalism] is gone and it is not easily replaced.”
Todd Heywood provided reporting for this article.
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