Newspapers: A sad milestone in New Orleans

In New Orleans, loyal readers reacted with “a combination of shock, incredulity, anger, and sadness,” said John Pope in The Washington Post. The city’s beloved 175-year-old newspaper, The Times-Picayune, announced this week that it will publish only three days a week, slash its staff by a third, and move precious remaining resources to an online edition. It’s a last-ditch effort to stanch huge losses in advertising and circulation following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. When that storm brought the city to its knees, said David Carr in The New York Times, the professional journalists of The Times-Picayune did their jobs “even as their families dispersed and their houses were underwater.” The newspaper’s steadfast work “reunited families” and “brought order out of incredible chaos.” Over the years, The Times-Picayune has exposed rogue cops, corrupt politicians, and a broken prison system. But can a newspaper play a vital role in a community “when it doesn’t land day after day on doorsteps”?

It’s not paper and ink we should care about saving, said Jeff Jarvis in BuzzMachine.com. “It’s the journalism and service.” As the Web grows in importance and reach, 14 daily papers have closed since 2007. Only a hybrid print-online model will save more papers from going under. Still, it will be an uncertain transition, said Nat Ives in Ad Age. On the Web, newspapers give their content away for free, and online ads cost just a fraction of what print ads do. The Times-Picayune, for example, took in $64.7 million last year in print advertising, but only $5.7 million via its website. Online revenue won’t pay for the kind of crusading journalism produced by The Times-Picayune, let alone that of a larger newspaper.

To avoid “slow suicide,” newspapers must “swallow hard,” and start charging for online content, said David Simon in the Columbia Journalism Review. The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have already “embraced the paywall, and they are seeing significant revenue”—tens of millions of dollars. Other major newspapers must follow. Once the stories in the big dailies are no longer shipped around the Web for free, papers like The Times-Picayune can start charging for local content, too—maybe at half or a third of the cost of print delivery. Those who shout that “information wants to be free” don’t understand a very basic fact: “Until newspapers recover a revenue stream for their online product, they have no future.”

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