How long do you think secondary big city newspapers can hold out?

I predict these papers will be totally online with only token print editions by 2008.

Sun Times
Minniapolis Star Tribune
SF Examiner

I have a very hard time believing any the aggregator sites or the bloggers are pulling down greater CPMs than “originator” sites in the same market segment (general news. business news, sports, etc.) If they are prospering, it’s not because of fat profits, it’s because their thin cost structures allow sustainability at lower revenue levels.

Lazarus’ bitterness toward the aggregators is misplaced, pitiful and probably futile. His slag on Dan in his followup column is an insult. And his concluding remarks holding up the record industry as a model for professional journalists could not possibly be more ill-timed, given the brutally negative front-page article about the record industry that the WSJ ran last week. Basically, this guy is making an ass of himself.

1. If journalism is so crucial to the functioning of a democratic society, why can it only survive if the companies who publish it make astronomical amounts of profit (compared to most industries)? I would like to lay a little more blame for the ‘demise’ of newspapers at the feet of newspaper company shareholders and executives and a little less at the feet of those exploring the new possibilities of the online medium.

2. I use We the Media to teach my online journalism students about the new news environment. Many of them (those 18-24 year olds who are supposedly only watching the Daily Show and surfing the web) are as resistant to the idea of citizen journalism as Mr. Lazarus. Most of them want to be print journalists. One of our recent graduates was part of the New Orleans Times Picayune team that won the Pulitzer for its coverage of Katrina, and another just turned down a job as a feature writer because she likes her current job covering municipal meetings and crime scenes. As long as young people like this exist, journalists will exist. Whether they can get paid to do what they love to do is up to the media conglomerates that own most of the newspapers.

3. Just to paraphrase my own blog entry on this topic, Mr. Lazarus didn’t seem to have any problem borrowing quotes from Dan or from me for his column. What is the difference between him taking quotes from our blogs and using them in his column and us taking quotes from his column and using them in our blogs?

4. Finally, I wish people like Mr. Lazarus would see that what we are conducting here is a conversation - he has an opinion, we have opinions, we all write about them. The only difference is that now I don’t need to be a full time columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle to publish my opinions. In the long term, this increased level of engagement is a good thing for journalism. (Not that I have to tell you that, Dan.)

In short, I wish there was a greater financial commitment to investigative journalism. But I think projects like assignmentzero.com and tpmmuckraker.com have just as much of a chance of producing investigative journalism as existing newspapers. But we have to give them a chance to succeed. Investigative journalism will go on; it just may not be in the form Mr. Lazarus is used to.

Just my $0.02.

I hate to throw it out there, but it truly is The Starfish and the Spider. Someone is trying to control and moderate a living, breathing, free, open system that doesn’t have any location, ownership, nor any responsibility to any person, industry, company or law. In Digital Aboriginal, the question was “Who owns the Wind?”. No one owns it. That’s a hard pill to swallow, but this is a new frontier and people are going to have to adapt.

We saw how Unions tried to fight automation and machinery to protect skilled technicians and tradesmen… it was a futile battle and automation won. Now we’re fighting for hierarchical control and ownership of information in a world that makes it accessible and free… it’s a futile battle. The RIAA is fighting piracy… and losing.

Change is always painful. Great industries will die, good companies will go under, valid business plans will fail, and talented people will be left behind. That’s life. You can adapt, or you can be left behind. It’s really that simple - no law is going to help you.

I think we should all be able to agree that that the future economic viability of traditional (elite) journalism is going to depend on the goodwill of its audience. (To an extent the same obviously goes for citizen journalism, with its participating ex-audience.) Because, fair use or no fair use, nothing will stop the free circulation of information. But it that really a reason to panic? Goodwill is not in short supply, as the open-source movement proves. Tax-free donations, charitable foundations, micropayment subscriptions together with transparent corporate sponsorship… The models are there.

If the traditional product is good, a way will be found to finance it. I currently pay a hefty online subscription to The Economist. To me it’s worth it: the journalism is top quality, I couldn’t be without it, and I want to contribute.