Paul Swider on Papers' Future

The following is a Q&A e-mail interview by OurBlook about the future of newspapers with Paul Swider, a reporter with the St. Petersburg Times until being laid off last May.

The San Diego paper is up for sale, the Miami paper is up for sale, the Minneapolis paper has missed an interest payment, the Chicago Tribune empire is in bankruptcy ... on and on we could go ... can you foresee major metro areas in the U.S. suddenly being without the printed word as their primary reliable source of information? If so, is this something terrible and deplorable or just an economic fact of life?

PS:: Free alt-ish papers are still holding on, so there is a model that can work, though maybe not forever. The classic newspaper is probably dead, though. And that's fine, because it doesn't mean journalism is dead, just the host on which it once fed. Journalism needed to get closer to its sources anyway, and that's the readers/newsmakers who are its sustenance. Journalists, as they had operated, need to find a new place in the order, add value, or get out of the way.     

Can adjustments be made to fill the gap and if so what would they be?

PS: Adjustments are being made, just without the involvement of the Institution that was the newspaper. We can't forget that media are just that: a means of moving information from one place to another. If the media can refine, repackage, summarize, contextualize or otherwise add value to that information, they have a business case. But information exists and will move anyway, even if it has to find other channels, which is what it's doing. It may be through monolithic news portals, it may be through blogs, it may be Twitter, it may be a kind of peer-to-peer via e-mail, all of which exist and thrive now in some context. That may always be the case, or one may "win," but the days when the newspaper was the essential gateway are long gone. For journalists, it's reminiscent of the hockey philosophy of Wayne Gretzky, who advised learning to skate not to the puck, but where the puck is going to be.    

Are there any metro areas that you think will always have papers, and if so which ones and why?

PS: I think any metro can have a paper, it's just a question of what form it takes. But paper itself will be replaced by flexible displays, which some day will be cheap enough for everyone to own and will become ubiquitous platforms for all manner of communication.    

Just as one possible scenario ... is it plausible that USAT, the WSJ, NYT and WaPo will survive as national papers ... and the latter two as local ones as well ... and that for them to flourish they would form an economic consortium with bureaus in the major metro areas of the U.S. and the world ... but they wouldn't have separate reporters, they would have reporters doing the same story for all four to make it pay off?

PS: It's plausible and possible, but it's equally likely that instead of gathering, they will atomize entirely and the franchise will exist with individual journalists, who coalesce around an online platform that may or may not be owned by a single entity. Here's one way I look at it: what would happen if tomorrow those large national papers didn't exist? Would we cease to have the information they convey, or would someone, maybe a lot of someones, fill that gap? I think so. What it comes down to, then, is how do those organizations, or any journalism-based organization, manage the change that is facing them now? If they adapt, they survive, in some form. If not, the demand for information will find a provider.      

What do you think of the Detroit papers deciding to stop home delivery on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Saturdays?

PS: Feels like deck chairs on the Titanic.     

If many of its member papers fold, do you think the Associated Press ... America's major press distribution service ... can survive?

PS: I don't pretend to know the intricacies of AP's business structure, but in the abstract, I don't see any reason it can't survive. It's a matter of seeing the revolution and getting ahead of it.       

Do you think papers in smaller metro areas and smaller towns have a better shot at survival? For those that don't, might they be replaced by a pricy online newsletter in the same way that an investor in Fidelity who wants reliable news and advice about Fidelity funds would probably take a newsletter focusing on it?

PS: The resilience of any business in a transforming industry or a challenging economy depends on its ability to understand its strengths and capitalize on them. Smaller papers have strength in knowing their own communities. They cannot compete on national or international coverage, so they should abandon it, maybe even wire, because the audience can find more and better elsewhere. But the small, local paper has a unique ability to understand and report about its own community. It could be replaced in this, if it's not careful, but it can also maintain its position. To do so will require staff to care about such coverage and not, as many journalist do, always overreach to enhance a clip file. It will also require management to recognize the value of this and not punish as unambitious the reporter who wants to cover local news.    

The Wall Street Journal used to charge for its electronic version. When Murdoch took over, he made it free. The Little Rock paper is perhaps the only even remotely metro paper that charges. What do you think of the decision by almost all major papers to make their content available online for free?

PS: The only way you can charge online is if you have something so special that no one else can re-create. Don't charge for national politics because there's 1,000 other outlets to which the reader can turn, so you're done. But if you have a synthesis or data or other unique quality of content that others can't duplicate, you could charge for it and succeed. Of course, if you have that, you could also make it free and charge a lot for the ads that surround it.     

Some newspaper subscribers, anecdotally, say they love having a printed product delivered to them every day and love holding it in their hands and love having it as part of their daily routine. Is this a significant factor for newspaper economics or is it disappearing like the dodo bird? Is it a deep-seated habit or one easily broken?

PS: There's nothing like the feel of a good buggy whip, either.     

What do you think of Pro Publica (a foundation-supported investigative reporting venture that will offer its stories free)?

PS: What I read from them is great, but the real test is how it matures and how resilient it is to change.  

You worked as a reporter at a newspaper. What are the details and are you glad you did?

PS: I've been in and out of journalism for 20 years, everything from college sports in Illinois to local government in Florida to freelance international. I also worked in PR and marketing, international economic development, and even technology, in DC, Africa, Eastern Europe, even Tibet. It all feels the same to me because it all had to do with communications (at least my role) and their impact on people. In my latest newspaper stint, I covered local government and small business for the St. Pete Times, until I got laid off in May. I was aiming in that job to be as reader focused as I could be, addressing the topics and issues I heard them telling me they wanted to know about. I'd like to think I always thought that way, but I may not have in my earlier days because I hadn't spent a lot of time outside of newspapers. I think my focus on the local made me expendable because old-school journalism says you're supposed to be ambitious and look for the Big Story, but I felt I served the reader better listening to them than to my career aspirations. Didn't work out, but I'm still better for it. I now do some PR/bizdev for a tech startup and am about to start a job editing a magazine about Africa for a USG contractor.

I'm glad I worked at a newspaper, but I'm also glad I worked elsewhere. In fact, I think the biggest problem with the industry is that not enough newspaper people have ever done anything else. There's much to be said for years on the desk, but it also makes one deaf to the steamroller that is about to crush the old newsroom. Still, working in newsrooms is useful because it shows you another way to look at the world, albeit not always a good way. I'm glad I did it, but I'm also glad I worked in food service because of what it taught me of human nature and kinesthetic awareness, yet I don't want to go back to the kitchen. I could go back to a newspaper, but it would have to be in a forward-leaning position, not as a line reporter. Not that I'm too good for it, but just that it's a shrinking market and my background doesn't put me in a prime position for those jobs.     

Some bloggers delight in the demise of newspapers, saying journalists are elitists who care profoundly about themselves but not "the common people" and that when a paper lays off 50 reporters it's laying off 50 Obama-ites who slant the news. Some conservatives say they have no problem getting their news from various sites on the Web and that they simply don't trust the honesty or the competence of the reporting in their local paper. Of course, papers also get criticized by liberals for their coverage or editorial policy. What is your take on all this?

PS: There is a danger, in the fracturing of the media landscape, for readers to get a slanted view, but only if they choose to. There are so many outlets now that no one can claim "the media" are biased, but that's not to say that a given media consumer can't end up with a biased view, based on what they consume. No one's at fault there, except maybe a high school civics teacher.

The larger issue, and the one that makes me so "popular" with my erstwhile journalism colleagues, is humility, or its lack in the newsroom. Most reporters are well-meaning and believe they are doing a public service, but that is a legacy from an era when there wasn't that much information available to the general public. Now that there is, to persist in the attitude that the newspaper is the source of all information is kind of silly. Most government meetings are televised, many documents are publicly available, dissatisfied workers that were the source for many an expose can now publish directly themselves to the web, so a journalist isn't as indispensible as before, and may be superfluous in some contexts.

Founding the franchise on "access" is not a long-term strategy, either, and it misses that many very good and very important stories do not start or end at the highest levels of power. In short, the audience is also the news, so for journalists to consider themselves a required bridge between what's happening and who wants to know is missing the whole point. Yet that mindset persists and is at the root of the reluctance to change and misconception of how change may occur. Journalists need to think of themselves as less of a privileged class and more as regular folks whose job happens to grant them a little more inside knowledge of some, far from all, workings of society.

Which goes back to the point I made earlier about journalists who have spent too much time in the newsroom: how plausible is it to a reader for a journalist with experience only as a journalist to become an authority on any other topic? I can study government, I can talk to business people, I can learn about art or education or sports, but can I ever be more knowledgable about those topics than the people who make their living at them? With the ability for everyone to publish anytime, journalists need to back off from any kind of expert status and find value to add in a more legitimate way.       

Now you've started your own citizen journalism website. Can you give us some details on how and why? What do you think of bloggers and citizen journalists generally? Do you have many in your community and if so, what's their impact?

PS: I started one CitJ site for the SPTimes in 2005 called itsyourtimes.com. I ran it for a couple years but then the full-time Web staff took it over. I won't comment on its changes or present status because I still live here and know those people, but you can look at it yourself. Since being laid off, I've toyed with my own CitJ site and built it, but it hasn't taken off. Yet, thedeerhaveguns.com started off as pure CitJ, but the uptake by the community has been slow and I have been too busy trying to make a living to promote it more, so it's transmogrified into more of a personal blog of satire and analysis, but remains open for others to publish their own news of merit.

I got into CitJ for all the reasons I stated above, regarding the neo-Gutenbergian revolution of Web publishing, the failures of the industry to grasp their meaning, the hubris of journalists and what I saw as a space in which I could make a difference. Time will tell if I've had any effect, but I'm enjoying the journey.

There are a fair number of bloggers in the Tampa Bay area, but not as many as there should be, especially with open platforms like thedeerhaveguns available to them (hint). I have the utmost respect for bloggers and citizen journalists, or at least as much respect for them as I do for any individual who takes their task seriously. There are bad bloggers and citizen journalists just as there are bad mainstream journalists, but there are plenty of good on all sides, too. If people have interesting ideas and share them creatively, be it in a form of journalism or as a business to start or a non-profit or even a really neat crochet design, I appreciate what they do. Conventional journalists have no patent on the practice of journalism, even though some of them would wear a white lab coat to work if they thought they could get away with it.     

We've just elected a presidential candidate whose one-word mantra was unspecified "change." How can we so easily accept change at the very top of our political structure but fear it so much when it is applied within the news media?

PS: For one, no one knows what "change" will mean under Barack Obama. The federal government is so large that the most revolutionary leader couldn't implement impactful change on a timescale that would quickly affect ordinary people. As revolutionarily bad as has been the Bush administration, most Americans' lives hadn't changed that much until the economy fell apart, and some don't even feel that yet. So we like to hear about change from our politicians, but we don't always think we'll feel it, so it's easy to accept. That's not to take anything away from Obama, just the reality of turning an ocean liner.

As for change in the newsroom, that all depends on who you ask. Most media consumers don't feel any wrenching change. In fact, they probably like the shifts that have occurred and find more opportunity for variety of consumption, if they have an appetite. And those with greater interest are liberated by the ease of sharing their own information and views, which they couldn't do just a few years ago.

On the other hand, old-school journalists, while a good lot, are feeling the change because they haven't figured out where this ship is headed and if they have a seat onboard. That's to be expected in any transforming industry. My father was a hot-type printer from his early teens and managed, without a college degree, to move with the industry to cold type and even to photographic processes before he retired in the '80s. He couldn't embrace digital technology, but that was mostly because he'd found a niche and was biding his time until retirement, something a lot of journalists are doing now. Others have gone through the same paradigm shift: do I have enough time and energy to change with the industry, do I need to retool for something else, or should I just wait? Talk to autoworkers or steelmakers or farmers and you'll hear a similar story. If you live through a critical point in your profession, you have to adapt or move on. But don't cry for newspaper journalists, many of whom have dined out for decades on reporting about others' changes.  

Are there any other points you would like to make?

PS: It may be presumptuous of me to say it, but journalists need to take a step back and look long and hard at what they do, the criticism they receive, and the value they bring. All of those are in flux but not often adequately examined. Journalists can't expect the world to change to meet their needs, but should anticipate making changes themselves to fit in to the future. The old way is gone, but the future can be bright, if you can rethink your place in it. I'm sure people of longer experience than I will laugh to hear me say that, but they may be the people who need to hear it.

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