One of the themes, especially from the academic scholars, at Princeton's Future of News conference is that people are facing unprecedented choice for information and entertainment. It is much more difficult to attract the kind of audience that supported network television news in the United States and used to support large metro or regional daily newspapers. Society has an attention deficit, and David Robinson of Princeton put the challenge for newspapers most succinctily:
The gravitas of newspapers isn't the cheapest way to assemble an audience. It's also not the least expensive way to build a trusted or high-brow brand to sell advertising.
How are newspapers going to face this challenge?
But this isn't just newspapers that are suffering from competition for people's time and attention. Markus Prior of Princeton studied television news viewing patterns. The US networks had incredibly high ratings only until they had a captive audience. People turned on television to relax when they came home, and the only thing that was on was the news.
Now, they have a dizzying array of choices and much of it is entertainment, not news. He also found that a smaller group of Americans, so called news junkies, were watching more news and now consuming more news online. But most of the increase in television news viewing was of cable news networks, not the traditional broadcast networks.
Some held up the trust-funded model that supports the Guardian as one way for news organisations to weather this difficult time for newspapers, but others said that a market-driven business model needed to be found to support in-depth investigations and journalism that challenged the government.
Mark Davis, vice president of strategy for the San Diego Union-Tribune, put forward some of the best ideas of the two days about how newspapers, with their high legacy costs, might adapt to this world where people have many more information choices. He said that news sites needed to become news and information utilities that provided highly relevant information to their audiences to survive.
You have to think about what the audience wants. You have to think about utility. Do they want to find a movie? Do they want to find out about local government?
And there is another question, one that was asked occasionally during the two-day conference: What will journalists do in this new world? How will they get paid?
Dan Gillmor, best known for his book We the Media, said:
The career ladder that I got on as a journalist is gone. But it costs very little to try things with digital tools. It's only getting simpler and cheaper all the time.
He pointed out to profitable niche news sites such as GigaOm and TechCrunch.
But Eric Alterman said that the niches helped support the investigative journalism that no one else would do.
When you think of New York Times story on Pentagon flacks and domestic wire-tapping and Saudi dating rituals, there is no business model that will support those stories. You need living and tech section to support those stories. If you take this away, there won't be something to pay for those long form stories.
