News You Can Lose: Financial Page: The New Yorker.

Surowiecki opens with some interesting ruminations about why newspapers are going down. Then, he goes crazy and lays the blame at the feet of the greedy consumer who wants it all for free! The bastards! Soon we’ll get what we pay for!

Here’s the dirty secret of newspapers: For a very long time, most of the content has been crap. Read your local newspaper lately? Remember why you stopped?

Most papers are a strange mix of not-that-great local reporting and columnists mixed with repackaged wire feeds and syndicated content, paid for by bundled advertising. Most of the news in local papers isn’t. At least, isn’t worth paying for. It’s nice that you won the county fair, but it probably doesn’t need to be in my paper. A newsletter for people who care about fairs would be better.

We’re not losing original reporting, we’re losing the middle men that bundled all the content together. Good riddance.

We don’t need to worry about the future of newspapers, we need to worry about the future of reporters. Will there be business models that allow individual or small teams of quality investigative journalists to earn a decent living while also breaking important stories? Will the class of amateur and semi-pro reporters be able to fill in any gaps?

So many redundancies in reporting and news. Do we need dozens of variations on the sports page? How many film critics do we need? How many reporters does it take to cover a press conference? More than zero, but probably less than we have right now.

Content creators in most other industries are going through the painful process of changing the way that they charge for their content, finding some equilibrium between giving a way their stuff for free to attract fans and charging for specialized, related or premium versions. Here’s my non-bold prediction: News reporters will have to do the same.

Cartoonists can survive the death of paid syndication, surely the important content can as well.

photo credit: striatic