Phil Meyer on:

Being verballed by Rupert Murdoch: Shortly after my book, The Vanishing Newspaper, was published, Murdoch addressed the American Society of Newspaper Editors and to make his point about how serious the situation was he quoted my book in which I had a chart showing how the proportion of adults who read the newspaper everyday has been declining.

The chart went from 1972 to the present and then if you put a straight edge on it and extend it into the future, to where it reaches zero, it comes out in April 2043, as I said in the book. Murdoch extrapolated from that and said Meyer predicts the last newspaper reader will recycle the last newspaper in April 2043.

That was picked up – I have a Google Alert for the book and almost every time somebody mentions it, they have that quote from Murdoch, except they attribute it to me. I didn’t predict that the last newspaper would be published on 2043 because of course, publishers are not going to keep relentlessly putting out newspapers until there’s only one reader left. They will lose critical mass long before that.

How the internet impacts on newspapers: The internet is a disruptive new technology – it substitutes technology. The newspaper business has coped with new technology in the past and it’s usually been able to take advantage of it.  In the United States, newspaper household penetration, that is circulation as a percentage of households, peaked in 1922 (that’s because 1920 was the year that radio broadcasting began) and penetration has been declining ever since. 

Newspapers have coped through two strategies, by merging, shaking down to one per market and by adapting new technology. Newspapers have been very fond of technology but this is one which they should embrace because it takes away the huge variable cost of ink and newsprint and transportation. And if there’s only a smooth, non-chaotic way to move newspaper operations from ink on paper to the internet, everything would be fine because the business can grow their circulation without growing their costs. But it’s so different and the disruption is so great and the newspaper culture is so comfortable with the way it has done things in the past that it can’t do that and that’s why the good applications have to come from somebody out in their field that we never heard of before, like Craig Newmark of Craigslist.  We’ll have to re invent journalism to fit that model.

Citizen journalism: One of the key things that has to be done is to develop some kind of certification program so we can tell the good citizen journalists from the purely amateur ones. Every time I raise this in the US, I get shouted down by people, who say “Certification would violate our First Amendment rights.”  They say that because they confuse certification, which means attesting someone’s competence, with licensing, which of course in a free country is impossible. 

Our First Amendment wouldn’t allow licensing. But certification, having somebody attest to your competence is something that we have plenty of precedent for. When we give student a degree in journalism or a media company hires a journalist, we are certifying his or her competence.  I just found out today, by searching the internet, that the Society of
Professional Journalists, our leading professional association in journalism has began a citizen journalism academy. It’s a travelling school for citizen journalists, that in a few days gives them the basics of news writing and the moral standards of journalism. And of course, they will have to get a piece of paper attesting to at least to the fact that they completed that course.

Who will pay for journalism: Geoff Dougherty’s Chi-Town Daily News in Chicago sells advertising. That’s not the only source – it has a big grant from the Knight Foundation that will carry it for the first couple of years, but Geoff ’s plan is to sell advertising and he can get by with pretty small revenue because his publishing costs are so low. Most of his reporters aren’t paid, some editors get paid and some advertising salesmen, of course; but the variable costs are non-existent so I think it’s possible to make that a sustainable enterprise. It will not make as much money as a traditional newspaper did the past but it might be sustainable.

Gen Y: Traditional newspapers are being ignored by the young. They have been socialised to different kinds of stimuli. There are all kinds of ways to get information, all kinds of ways to be entertained that we older newspaper reading folks didn’t have. Free newspapers are going to help but they’re not going to replace iPods and the twittering and all the Facebook and all
the other ways that young people have to get news about the world.  For example there was a research conference here on what kinds of theories of mass communications we are going to have pursue in the future. One of my grandchildren attended and she’s 14. She was asked by the person next to her, a professional, where she had learned about a very newsworthy and tragic murder that occurred in our town a few months ago.  And she said she found out about it from Facebook. Young people are getting information in ways that simply are not fathomable by we who are steeped in traditional newspaper tradition.