dan ho

The reasons listed on the introductory page of this cause miss the point. Newspapers were dying when there were plenty of advertisers, no Web competition, and a healthy economy.

The paper has been dying for decades because of the way news stories are conceived, reported and written. Lots of news is three days old by the time someone can find the time to read a paper after work, yet it’s written as first-day, breaking news. . News magazines, meanwhile, cover events and have a longer shelf life. The average news story is a compromise. Short stories aren’t short enough and long stories aren’t long enough. The news hole has created the tweener story, which doesn’t tell the story briefly and doesn’t tell it in depth. It does neither, and it doesn’t do it well.

Technology is finishing the job that bad editors and reporters started. The paper is a format that doesn’t fit into the lifestyles of today’s consumer. Few people, sadly, have the time to sit and read. And when they do, they can get fresher news on a smartphone or at their desktop. Television turned the paper into a second-day news source, even though few editors and reporters got that memo. And now the 24/7 Web has turned TV into a secondary news source and rendered newspapers irrelevant in most instances. The only reason papers are still around is that no one can figure out how to monetize community news portals effectively and consistently. Once someone does that, we’re sunk.

The newspaper will never, ever be what it was, nor should it be. Like any institution, the newspaper has to profoundly change or it will die. And if papers don’t change, they deserve to die.

Fixing the paper:

1. Break news on the web. Explain it in the paper

2. Don’t dumb down the paper by making it hyper-local. Let citizen journalists do that.

3. Allow skilled journalists to use the Web to tell stories without the artificial constraints of space and deadline. Space and deadline are the ruination of the paper because they create the tiny window in which print news is relevant.

4. Turn the paper into lots of briefs and a few stories that are worth reading.

5. Big photos

6. Stop trying to cater to a dying demographic in print and instead try to lure new readers by providing edgier stories

7. Monetize the Web site or fire the people who can’t do that

8. Make beats relevant to the people of Earth. No one cares about City Hall or meetings, for example. They care about laws and decisions that affect them. No one cares about transportation. They care about traffic.

9. Anything that journalists cover should be happening as it’s being reported on the Web. Or explained in advance and in depth in the paper.

Facebook | Causes | Don’t Let Newspapers Die.

The above was a post by a Roy Bragg on the site. I can’t confirm this, but a quick google search seemed to indicate he is a writer with the San Antonio Express News.

I think he raises some great points!