Davemolloy.net

Jennifer O’Connell wrote a piece on page 5 of the Sunday Business Post’s Agenda magazine today about the problems facing the newspaper industry. It’s interesting for two reasons: first, it’s a working journalist in the Irish media writing about it, and second, it’s published in the main column space of the magazine, bringing it into the mainstream.

Unfortunately, I wouldn’t exactly call it insightful or ground-breaking.

It’s tempting to blame newspapers for our own troubles. Sure, we shouldn’t have been so reliant on advertising in general for revenue, and property advertising in particular. Yes, we should probably have embraced the internet more enthusiastically and sooner, and dreamed up applications like Twitter ourselves. We should have had our journalists blogging and micro-blogging and podcasting years ago.

But we can still do some things better than the shiniest video iPod. Opinion and analysis, for one thing. Design, for another. Photography.

Crosswords. Special commemorative editions. Important world events. Local news. Niche news. Letters pages. Reliable, interesting, thought-provoking content. A respite from all that distracting technology.

This, essentially, is Ms Connell’s opinion. And what strikes me is how behind the times it is. The piece in question seems to read more like a sales pitch than an analysis of how things are. And the problems with the above are huge. firstly, the news media did embrace the internet early on. Hell, even my college newspaper was online in 1994. And the idea that we shoudl have “dreamed up applications like Twitter ourselves”: really? Really? In this period of unparalleled experimentation and upheaval, the mainstream media orgnaisations should have predicted the clear rise of 140-character status messages? Besides the absurdity of that claim, the simple fact is that Twitter probably wouldn’t have succeeded if it had been launched by a large media organisation. It started small, gained a cult following, and then just… exploded. Essentially, Twitter was a viral app. Mainstream media can’t, and never will, be able to predict or replicate that kind of growth.

Oh, and the iPod is a digital device. It’s not hard to do things better than it. It’s inanimate. It’s the content creators we have to worry about- and I’m sorry, we really can’t compete on opinion. Analysis maybe, but old-style “opinion”, in which we get a professional on a topic to write about it, is getting less and less relevant every day. There’s ten thousand experts on any given topic writing about it themselves. the print industry as a middleman is getting less important.

And when it comes to design and photography: I don’t understand how the skills involved in photography differ between print and digital media. I do, however, understand that newsprint is like toilet paper, and viewing photographs on a lovely high-resolution display is a comparative joy. Print design is beautiful, yes, but if you’d like a demonstration of the evolution of web design, see http://www.bbc.co.uk/politics97/ and http://www.bbc.co.uk. Ten years or so and worlds apart. Just like the evolution of print itself, the web is still finding its feet. The argument about print design’s superiority is one which I anticipate having a short life span.

And then, of course, we come to this little nugget:

Readers will subscribe to some, or all, of what we offer… What’s happening now to newspapers will come to be seen not as a revolution, but as an evolution, just as the video recorder represented an evolution in the age of television, and television represented an evolution in the age of radio.

Oh dear. The assumption that, after more than a decade of free online content, subscription models will naturally fall into place, is woefully out of touch with the reality. A simple Google search (the “big, fancy, high-tech newsagent,” apparently) would produce much banter on the failed subscription models of, e.g., the New York Times. And I’m sorry, but the radio has survived entirely on its immensely pervasive, hands-free enjoyment element. Further, it’s a technology which has survived: radio today is very different to radio in the pre-television era. The equivalent comparison would be “there will be paper products in the future.”

The newspaper is in trouble. It’s in a period of revolution, not evolution, Miss Connell. As a young and aspiring journalist, I’d love to work in the print media. I love it. But I’m damn sure I’m not going to shut me ears and pretend it’s mostly going to work out. I’m ready to jump ship if necessary, and you should be too. Rather than close the piece with “Either that, or I will be out of a job,” I’d recommend a bit of optimism. The newspaper might die: journalism probably won’t.