Did the Demise of Newspapers Have to be?

Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine has an interesting commentary on how the Economist is succeeding while the majority of newspapers around it fail. His point is that being a quality publication allows it to buck the conventions of the Internet age (particularly the convention that everything must be free).

This point was also raised by David Simon (writer of the Wire on HBO and a former Baltimore Sun reporter) in an interview on Bill Moyers Journal. When they were flush with cash in the 1990s, rather than investing in themselves and alternative ways of monetizing their services, newspapers bowed to the pressures of corporate consolidation which drove them to cut corners to help boost stock prices.

In an interview with Michigan Radio today about citizen journalism, MSU professor Stephen Lacy talked about how newspapers can't be hyper-local (which has prompted the rise in citizen journalism - to cover what is being neglected).

My question is - why can't establishment newspapers be hyper-local? Why does each one have to expend its resources trying to cover all of the world/national news as though there aren't dozens of other outlets doing the exact same thing in the same market on any given day?

What if ... newspapers invested in doing a good job catering to the niche right around them (instead of pumping their papers full of baldly-edited wire service stories and syndicated content)?

What if ... instead of aiming broadly with one huge metro edition, the newspapers put their regional editions on steroids and crafted a newspaper around the interests/news of a particular community (going so far as to only discuss national/world matters as they pertain to the hyper-local community)?

What if ... instead of trying to compete with the Internet, TV and Radio to break stories as fast as possible, newspapers concentrated on their traditional strength: depth (and tweak that by offering a customizeable local news experience for each user that would help recommend content via some Amazon/Netflix-esque engine)?

Maybe someone smarter than me has already asked and answered these questions. It just seems that there's a lot of opportunity out there just waiting to be harnessed with a little innovation and some heart. Are there seriously no opportunities to seize upon with iPhone/Blackberry apps, or Kindle licensing? No opportunities to sell highly-targeted ads like Facebook and Google?

A Hurdle for Citizen Journalism: Lawsuits

As the Poynter Institute notes, lawsuits against bloggers are on the rise going from four in 1997 to 89 in 2007. While the number seems small - it's a disturbing indicator of what will likely be a rapidly-increasing trend as advertising revenues continue to decline and the mainstream media is increasingly unable to return the higher profits demanded by stockholders (forcing staffing and budget cuts to news departments).

Corporations, having lost their bid to turn the Internet into a medium like the conventional media (where wealth controls one's level of access) by overturning Net Neutrality, are invariably going to seek out alternatives to preserve the control they exert over the traditional mass media. That means lawsuits; and frivolous lawsuits at that - knowing that bloggers lack the legal protections afforded to journalists do (being shielded behind the masthead of a newspaper that can afford to fight off "junk" lawsuits alleging defamation or copyright infringement).

This is one of several major hurdles to "citizen journalism" being able to take over in the wake of the declining quality of the mainstream for-profit news media. Another hurdle often cited is the lack of formal training for most bloggers (who do not frequently observe the standards journalists do which are designed to preserve objectivity in reporting).

It will be interesting to see what happens as this trend worsens. Will citizen journalists band together to form a consortium (which might maintain legal protections for member journalists who pay dues and agree to adhere to a certain set of standards)? Will legislation be introduced (or will case law be interpreted) that grants bloggers immunity from this sort of suit? Time will tell.

Regardless of the outcome, it will be interesting to observe what happens - and it will bear directly on how the First Amendment is interpreted in the forseeable future.