How I tried to save newspapers -- aka, 'The Daily Titanic'
For 30+ years I tried my best to make the papers I worked for more entertaining and more ideologically diverse. In 2012 I offered some radical ideas to save a sinking daily paper in a dying industry.
It’s way too late now, and it was already way too late to save newspapers in 2012, but here’s a summary of my idea for a radical, bottoms-up way newspapers could save themselves by taking advantage of the miracles of the digital age.
I recently sent a version of this rant to the Facebook group for about a thousand ex-LA Times employees like me (1979 to 1989). No one there seemed to care, either.
For the Record:
How I tried to save the Daily Titanic
In about 2012 I tried to tell the editor of a sinking daily newspaper in Pittsburgh that in order to save itself as a relevant and semi-profitable business, it should:
1) Fire all (unionized) editorial employees; hire back the best of them; no more union, ever.
2) Hire ten or 20 hot-shot j-school students or hustling free lancers/stringers and give them new smartphones/iPhones; give them specific geographic areas and/or new and different beats to 'own' -- not just towns, suburbs, schools, but also airports, malls, rivers, nightlife, churches, whatever made sense -- and especially cover the historically under-served black community.
Give the young reporters no desks; no offices; their 'office' was their designated area; have them patrol their areas or beats, write blog posts throughout the day on all subjects (sports, commerce, schools, etc.) that are posted immediately on the paper's web site; seek out local news, feature stories and jump on big news such as derailed trains, fires, bad car crashes, etc;
Reporters should watch the sky for crashing airplanes; if a plane does crash, get to the scene asap, shoot video, type info, write snippets, whatever, and email your stuff to the paper's city desk/editors, who will polish it and put it online asap. The newspaper's web site would consistently beat local radio and TV to the big news; then send nearby reporters to the scene, plus staff photogs, and cover everything in full until the story is done.
Everything goes online first, ASAP, and in a big way; then the next morning, the paper (i.e., the editors) puts out a printed paper that includes the airplane crash story and whatever followups would naturally follow.
The online plane crash stories tease/link to the next day's print story and the print story links back to the online story, which can be updated and fleshed out with stuff from the print version. The print version would be something special each day -- a package of the best stuff, the important stuff, the investigative series, the analyses and commentaries, local and national, put together by editors who knew how to use computers.
The hybrid digital/print newspaper should become a never-ending back and forth stream of information between online and print; it should be news and features from the bottoms up, created by reporters with personalities who closely cover (live in, figuratively) their areas/beats and produce feature or news material that they know is important and interesting. It should be 20 individual voices -- columnists, really -- with good journalism skills producing copy with as little oversight/meddling as possible from the editors in the downtown office.
On big breaking news, reporters would be echoing the reporters of olde who pay-phoned in the basic facts of their six-alarm fire story to rewrite men and women who'd slam it onto Page 1 of the fourth PM edition in time for rush hour. (See one of a thousand 1930s newspaper movies.)
Reporters would have to be superior and multi-skilled journalists: they'd have to be able to report, shoot decent photos and video, record interviews, do longer Q&As -- do whatever is needed to capture the news info or deliver their commentary.
Of course, the editor of the Pittsburgh paper had no interest in listening to my crazy revolutionary remaking of the daily newspaper to accommodate the new digital world.
He, like his peers and immediate underlings, hated the internet and didn't know how to exploit its obvious benefits to transmit information instantly and easily. He also, for obvious reasons, favored the rigid, top-down, ancient 1930s system of editorial control that relied on layers of specialized editors and copy editors who over-handled the copy.
Everything that bloggers, podcasters and then substackers learned to do since 2012 could have been learned and used by a new breed of autonomous independent reporter.
Needless to say, this was an impossible dream. It was already way too late.
Everyone knows the sad story: The news and opinion monopoly of newspapers was already blown up. Profits from classified were decimated by Craig's List; editorial and political relevancy was eroded; old people who read papers were dying; young people didn't buy or read print.
Newspapers, which took too long to embrace and adapt to the internet, committed a form of collective suicide that has left cities and towns with no coverage by any kind of print news media.
In the future, print might return -- like vinyl records. My bet is on a rebirth of pamphlets.
Late-breaking comment:
Newspapers had it sweet for 100-plus years: high profits, political power; community respect (most of the time), but they were so smug and so complacent that when the Internet (and before that cell phones) came along.
The people in charge of papers hated the Internet and refused to adapt and change in any significant way.
Then, as the profits dried up and their world was disrupted, they turned into dinosaurs and blamed everyone and everything for their decline instead of themselves.
I was lucky to work in the last golden age of print, but I had to watch the newspaper biz commit collective suicide.