How newspaper closings will affect online news
My reporting continues on a story for Spot.us about the future of the Bay Area’s newspapers in an online world. As you’ve probably already read many times, the San Francisco Chronicle’s owner is looking to cut enough staff, and if it doesn’t it plans to either sell it or close the newspaper. The Rocky Mountain News couldn’t find a buyer and printed its last edition today, leaving open the possibility that the Chronicle won’t find a buyer either.
The news about the Chronicle won’t change my story for Spot.us, but it does add a timely, huge piece of information to it that makes it that much better of a story, I think.
Thursday I interviewed Alan Mutter, a former top editor at the Chronicle who has his own views on it and other newspaper matters. He had some interesting things to tell me about newspapers going online. While newspapers are becoming less and less of a place where people get their news, Mutter said, they or whoever else delivers the news online must figure out a way to make it pay.
One way is to charge for unique content, such as movie or restaurant reviews, he said. From the start of when newspapers gave their content away on the Web, it was a bad idea that wasn’t going to get them anywhere.
While a bit harsh, I’ve always likened it to a prostitute always asks to be paid first before providing her services. Somehow, newspapers have to get paid first for their content.
If the Chron, Rocky Mountain News and other major newspapers continue closing, or threaten to close, it will only send more journalists out into the street, where they’ll look for jobs elsewhere. The news that you now find online for free will either disappear or be replaced by untrained “citizen journalists.” While untrained reporters might find just as much news as a professional, readers might not be able to trust it as much for fairness, accuracy and everything else they get from their daily paper.
Online news sites will pick up some of the slack, such as The Public Press, but there won’t be enough paid reporters to pick up all of the news available in a newspaper.
One way newspapers can get some readers back is to be more interactive and meaningful in readers’ lives, Mutter said, through such sites as Yelp. However they do it, they’ve got to start trying more and better ways to get there. That’s what I’m trying to get at in this story for Spot.us.