NewsBeat

4 NewsBeat January 2018 Print will save the Newspaper industry I 've got news for the newspaper industry. Your future is in the hands of the print newspaper and not in the killing fields of digital media. If you think you are smarter than the folks at Rocket Fuel, which just saw its valuation plummet from $2 billion to $145 million, or at AOL and Yahoo, the erstwhile giants who are now being morphed into a smaller enterprise called Oath, or at any number of digital publishers desperately hanging on as the Duopoly chokes off the blood supply, then you are truly drunk on your own press releases. I know, because I was there, giving birth to boston.com and then off to New York to resuscitate nytimes.com during the crash of 2001- 2002. I stirred the drink and promulgated the "digital first" mantra, a fatuous promise if there ever was one, as if an eponymous change could cure our ills. Almost 25 years into this "experiment," I get faint nausea when I hear publisher after publisher, and worse, editor after editor, talk about how they are retooling their entire organization to adapt to this digital future. And taking the precious resources out of their core print product to do so, even though most newspapers still get two-thirds of their revenue from print. The latest is the missive from Gerald Baker, the titular head of the Wall Street Journal newsroom who wrote that WSJ editors must re-apply for new jobs defined by its latest reorg. "Reorg" — now that's a word which has crept into our lexicon without much warning, but with much foreboding. It means that "since we don't really know what is going to happen, we've decided to shake things up a bit." Unfortunately, it signals another unintended message: panic. The WSJ is panicking, along with the New York Times, Gannett and a host of other companies more worried about how to keep their stock prices growing than about sustaining their publishing legacies. I've got news for these companies: The stock market is a futures market which rewards growth companies. You need to come to terms that you are not a growth industry. You are cannibalizing your only differentiating asset — your print newsrooms — for a future in which you are not a king maker, but an observer, and a marginal one at that. Gannett has so depleted its local news operations, it is committing journalism malpractice. It is stealing those resources to prop up a brand that has virtually no consumer demand — USA Today — and hoping to calibrate a national sales strategy around it. In the meantime, it is destroying its viable local connections and products. So it's no surprise that Gannett was the only large newspaper company in the first six months of 2017 which showed a significant decline in subscription revenue — almost 8 percent — compared with growth at NYT, WashPo, WSJ, Hearst, McClatchy and even tronc. Still, the New York Times is deconstructing its vaunted editing infrastructure to fund dubious digital initiatives. The world does not need another cooking app. I love Melissa Clark, but quite frankly, when I need to make a pasta dish, I find dozens of professional Italian chefs eager to help me on YouTube, for free. The Times newspaper hasn't seen any significant innovation in the 15 years it's gone through four executive editors. Compare that with what's happening at the Washington Post, where owner Jeff Bezos has added 140 journalists since he acquired the paper in 2013. When he took over, Bezos said, the newsroom kept eliminating people. "What they needed was a little bit of runway and the encouragement to experiment, and to stop shrinking. You can't shrink your way into relevance," Bezos said. "We've grown our way into profitability instead of shrinking our way into profitability." Except for the Post, the industry is otherwise squandering a rare opportunity — the deus ex machina of fake news and the mess in Washington — which has resulted in the biggest increase in subscriptions to newspapers and their digital versions in more than two decades. It is a time to harness the value of the most trusted media, with our foot patrol of reporters who prowl the halls of municipal offices looking for any nugget which might interest a reader — the news consumer. I cut my teeth as a reporter for the Hartford Courant. I walked the beat every day in the city hall and courthouse in Middletown, Connecticut, where I would try to sneak a peek into the mayor's calendar when his secretary wasn't looking, bribe the court clerk with scotch so he would read me back juicy transcripts, flirt with the planning board clerk who filed all the building applications and download all the gossip from the loquacious health inspector. For sure I was not a Pulitzer-winning reporter for the Times or Post with under-secretaries of state and the like as sources. But I was doing a job my customers valued and could not do themselves. Do local reporters even walk beats anymore? Or do they sit in their cubicles, emailing, texting, posting and browsing their way to fill their pages? Most importantly, I presented my findings in a century-old format, trusted because it has a permanence to it, trusted because it took 24 hours to produce — not 30 seconds with the tap of an index finger — trusted because the process of story generation, fact finding, sourcing, writing and redacting by some sullen, uncompromising gatekeeper called a copy editor only made my final product better for its accuracy, its luminosity and its revelatory surprise. And trusted because it was on paper. There are many studies and research on newspapers as more trusted than almost any other media. Digital media has its place. Its mobility and real-time delivery of news are special indeed. But it's not a replacement, nor a salvation, for print. The book industry cycled through this and there is much to learn there. After a decade of decline, print books began a comeback at the end of 2014 and ebooks began a decline. By the end of 2016, ebooks were declining 11 percent in sales while print books were increasing at 4 percent. By LINCOLN MILLSTEIN

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