Keiran King: Newspapers are dying — but the news isn’t

Keiran King

Online Columnist

Last year, Nelson
Mandela left us, Prince
George joined us, there was black
smoke in Boston and white smoke in Rome. We saw it, shared it, tweeted and talked
about it before dinner. We celebrated and mourned before morning. By the time it
rolled off the presses, it was passé. No one heard the news from their newspaper.
That’s great for us, the insatiable public, but for venerable giants like The
Gleaner, rumbling along since 1834, the writing is on the Facebook wall — adapt
or perish.



By now, it’s old
news that print
news is dying, inch by precious column inch. (Witness The Gleaner’s svelte
new shape!) The Internet, disruptor of industries, has hit broadsheet media the
hardest, since the Web is essentially a huge newspaper, transmitting information
faster, farther and with more flair than its dead-tree cousin ever could.

Combined with the dominant perception that everything online should be free, the
media have spent the last decade squawking that the sky is falling.



But like all Chicken Little stories, it isn’t really true.



Yes, dailies are disappearing like supernova winking into darkness, including the
168-year-old News of the World. Newsweek, the perennial Pepsi to Time magazine’s
Coke, lost all its talent and succumbed
to its injuries in 2012. NewspaperDeathWatch.com
speaks for itself. And many of the biggest names in American news — The Boston
Globe, The Washington Post — have been sold
cheaply.



But where there is death, there is also life. Out of the inky ashes, a new kind
of journalism is sprouting all over the Web. The sites are clean, bold and uncluttered,
to gain your trust. The writing is crisp, intimate and direct, to gain your attention.
And the men behind them (and for better or worse, they are all men) hope to make
a lot of money by not caring too much about making it. We’ll meet them in a
minute.



News organisations have traditionally concerned themselves with the 3 Ws —
what happened, where and when. But in the age of 24-hour cable news and ubiquitous
access to Twitter, that job has been usurped. So the new kids on the block (and
some old ones) have abandoned the 3 Ws for higher ground —how and why.



Ezra Klein, 29, is on a mission is to help us “understand the news". He
left the Washington Post to start Vox.com. A typical
article: ‘Everything
you need to know about Pope Francis'. Nate Silver, 36, swapped his blog at The
New York Times for his own FiveThirtyEight.com,
to “make the news a little nerdier”. His goal? To
bring rigorous data analysis to journalism. Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald
left The Nation and The Guardian, respectively, to run The
Intercept, a place where they can “publish stories without regard to whom
they might anger or alienate”. And all of that is just since January.



There are others. Marco
Arment, 31, started and handed over The Magazine, a publication that trades
quantity for quality. Twitter’s founders made Medium,
a publishing platform to “increase
depth of understanding”. And The Times, it's a-changing too, overhauling
its well south site and launching its own
explanatory companion, The Upshot, in a few months.



So, despite the caterwauling, there has never been a better time to be a journalist,
and for journalism in general. At their peak, newspapers in the biggest cities had
an audience of a few million. There are 500
million English-speakers online, all hungry for information, and tens of millions
more joining them each year. With open-source web architecture like Wordpress, distribution
costs are now near-zero. Never before in history have so many people been available
to so few for so little.



What is dying is not the business of making news, but the business model of the
newspaper. The Gleaner (and every broadsheet) is really a billboard company, selling
advertisements surrounded by articles. The Internet, with an infinite supply of
ad space, destroyed the scarcity newspapers created, and with it their financial
viability. The question is no longer if traditional papers will die, but when. Size
and geography are irrelevant. For the first time in 400 years, news houses are competing
on a level playing field — the quality of the news itself. If the writing is
good, we’ll find it, read it and even pay
a little for it. If it’s ordinary, we won’t. May the best mag win.

Keiran King is a writer and producer. His column appears every Wednesday. Find him on Twitter @keiranwking. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and yell@keiranking.com.