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“There’s no mystery: they’re dying,” Gary Kamiya, co-founder, former
executive editor and writer-at-large of Salon.com, said in a discussion on
CBC Radio’s Q on Tuesday.
‘”The death of newspapers means the death of reporting. There’s been no
business model that’s been created so far that allows reporting online to be
sustainable in a financial way.’-Gary Kamiya, co-founder Salon.com
Amid the ongoing job losses reported in countless employment sectors, there
have been an increasing number of media layoffs, plunging profit revelations
and newspaper closures affecting outlets in Canada and the U.S.
South of the border, examples include the Christian Science Monitor ending
its print edition, the Washington Post announcing that its fourth-quarter
profit plunged 77 per cent, more than 30 U.S. dailies seeking Chapter 11
bankruptcy protection since January, plus the closure of Denver’s Rocky
Mountain News.
Meanwhile, in Canada, job cuts have affected media giants Torstar, Canwest,
Sun Media, CTVglobemedia, Transcontinental and independents like the
Chronicle Herald in Halifax.
“The death of newspapers means the death of reporting. There’s been no
business model that’s been created so far that allows reporting online to be
sustainable in a financial way,” Kamiya said from San Francisco.
Toronto Star publisher John Cruickshank, former publisher of CBC News,
pointed to the large debt carried by many U.S. newspaper firms, as well as
Canadian media company Canwest, as a fundamental problem.
Need to create value in mix of media
With even the venerable New York Times struggling to make a profit, what
every print outlet is racing toward is “how we can find a new mix of news on
several different media and to create a model there,” said Cruickshank,
speaking from Q ‘s Toronto studio.
While the print industry might have to face producing newspapers for a
smaller market, companies must also create online products that people will
value, read and pay for, he said.
Despite sites like CBC.ca and Thestar.com having “millions of unique viewers
each month,” he agreed with Kamiya that news outlets still haven’t figured
out how to be profitable “on the ‘net, yet.”
Subsidizing newspapers is one option, though Kamiya pointed out that to
sustain the current operations of the New York Times, it’s estimated that
the paper would need an endowment of approximately $5 billion US.
While Cruickshank said he feels a publicly subsidized newspaper might work
because there are people willing to pay for investigative and conventional
reporting, he specified that the industry must also pay attention to the
audience’s changing definition of news.
“The issue, it seems to me, is not so much ‘Do people want newspapers?’ as
‘Do they want news?’ and ‘What’s the definition of the news they want?’
That’s changed really remarkably over the last decade.”
Tough times ahead
“Newspapers are floundering desperately around and they’re searching for new
ways out [of the current crisis]. I don’t think they’ve found them yet,”
Kamiya said.
“[However,] the thought of the gallows concentrates the mind wonderfully and
I think you’re going to see a lot of changes in the newspaper industry. We
don’t know what they’ll be yet.”
Cruickshank predicted there will be more bad news before the eventual good.
“We’re gonna see fallout of the sort that we saw when television entered the
market and killed, what, about half the newspapers in North America,” he
said.
“We’re living through a period of creative destruction. We did with the
advent of television and the end of afternoon newspapers, evening
newspapers,” Cruickshank said, adding however that, “There will be new forms
that evolve as a result and I think, ultimately, that people will be well
served by them.”
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