NewsBeat

January 2018 NewsBeat 5 And here is another startling fact: According to a study by Pew Research, 18–29 year olds are more likely to read print books than any other generation. And 25 percent of college students prefer to buy print textbooks even when they can get the ebooks for free. Chantal Restivo-Alessi, the chief digital officer for Harper Collins said holding the price for the hardcover is important for the industry to establish value. Once you start to discount for that core product, or eliminate it, pricing becomes a slippery slope for the paperback and ebooks. This is an extremely important data point for newspaper publishers. In a world without print, you're subject to the vagaries of a perpetually disruptive marketplace. I would not want to take that gamble. "This industry spent 20 years teaching everyone in the world that news should be free," Bezos said. "The truth is, readers are smarter than that. They know high-quality journalism is expensive to produce, and they are willing to pay for it, but you have to ask them. We've tightened our paywall, and every time we've tightened our paywall, subscriptions go up." After predictions of the death of the print newspaper in America for 25 years, more than 1300 are still publishing every day. The New York Times sells to more than 1 million print buyers, the Houston Chronicle delivers to more than 300,000 homes every Sunday. Thirty million Americans still spend their Sunday mornings with a century old ritual at the kitchen table, front porch, verandas of all sizes, coffee shops, libraries and studies. This is extremely heartening given the massive shift from an advertising reliant business model to a largely subscription-based industry. The consumer demand is there even though most newspapers are a pretty lousy product, filled with too much content better done by digital media and not enough journalism. What if we actually started to produce a better product, filled with enterprising journalism, on better paper with clear value for the reader, as if every page offered insightful discovery, instead of 30-hour-old canned news sitting on the pages like stale bread. It will never be 1998 again for American newspapers, nor will they ever see 1999 or 2000 again. They no longer can be all things to all people. That was a brief moment in history when monopoly newspapers were so dominant in their markets that they successfully stretched the product beyond its core mission. Newspapers will have to re-build themselves from scratch, page by page, going back to an era predating advertising — to the early Nineteenth Century when they were a high-priced item for the literate and the influential and they co- existed with bloggers (pamphleteers). Only then will advertising return at scale, when marketers fully appreciate the influence of the readership. Publishers need to examine whether, as an industry guaranteed by our Constitution, they will be satisfied with playing a singular role as a vanguard of freedom in their communities. To sustain that role, they will need to be ruthless about controlling the cost of anything that isn't journalism. Citizens will continue to pay for protection from tyranny only if they believe newspapers are a true vanguard. As newspapers continue to shrink their journalism resources, the consequences for society — and indeed democracy itself — are great. Journalism is as important now as ever. Lincoln Millstein is a former newspaper journalist and executive. He was recently awarded Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to write a book on newspapers. — Reprinted from Medium

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