Introduction

The newspaper is the oldest source of recordable, transferable, periodical news. It is formed from a technology as old as Gutenberg, yet it continues to be a major source of news today. And there is no question that, at least in America, newspapers — or at least, newspaper companies — do the finest reporting.

But as an institution, newspapers have been very slow to adapt to changes in technology. While recent changes in technology can and do have a profound impact on the role that newspapers play, this isn’t just about the Internet, and it isn’t an assertion that newspapers have suddenly become obsolete.

There’s nothing “sudden” about it. Newspapers were obsolete before any of us were born.

Newspapers of today are produced and designed for an era that was over and gone long before the age of intercontinental rail travel. Much consideration in design and form was developed during an earlier age, and the newspaper “profession” didn’t seek to let go of its detrimental and, frankly archaic design standards. But newspapers continued to thrive because, for the most part, all the respectable papers adhered to the same exceptionally quaint standards, and secondly, the reporting was usually high quality, compared to newer technologies like radio and television.

In short, this is not because the newspaper as designed is a particularly well-suited medium for disseminating news compared to other media, but because the other media performed abysmally. For the first time, with the advent of the Internet, where much of the exact same news text can be found in a different format, newspapers need to address the quaint nature of newspaper design. And the young are noticing.

While the overwhelming reason people no longer read a newspaper is civic disengagement (which leads to an overall decline in all news consumption) and that it is still an overwhelming problem, two things deserve notice. First, at least for the 2004 election cycle, civic engagement was up. Voters turned up, protesters showed up, churches rallied, and bloggers blogged. The Dean campaign was built entirely around civic re-engagement and its impact on elections from this point on cannot be overestimated. By no means did it reverse generations of a trend decline in news consumption, but at least for the moment, people gave a damn.

And, according to a report from the Audit Bureau of Circulations, newspaper readership is still dropping . This implies that there are other factors in newspaper consumption that haven’t been addressed.

Newspaper publishers have a strong imperative to remove the other barriers — and there are quite a few — to newspaper readership. For one, while one may deride the rise of the Blogosphere, there is no question that the hundreds of thousands online who post, comment, and read blogs have encouraged and fostered civic engagement, especially with the technically savvy of the youngest adult and teenage generation. If newspapers want to remain relevant, they need to be a product that is simple to use, provides what the customer wants and not what it doesn’t, and is in total, a package that people look forward to reading.

To that end, there are seven major problems with newspapers that can be addressed at the current time, mostly by redesigning the paper, not the news content, without succumbing to the temptation to dumb news content down.

They are, specifically: The insistence of most newspapers to print in Broadsheet format, the use of jumps, the practice of bundling different sections of the newspaper into the same delivered package, the emotionally detached writing style of newspapers, the low emphasis on political reporting, the adherence to the “breaking news mentality” at a time when newspapers no longer break news (which leads to an unnecessary lack of depth,) and the “truth monopoly mindset” at a time when the news business is purely competitive and the lack of context and depth for complex stories.