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.

Broadsheets

Broadsheets:

At one time, the broadsheet was a very useful form of delivering news. The main advantage of the broadsheet is that it was big, and you could fit quite a lot of text on it. You could get more information on a single sheet of paper. If you wanted to put the same information, on say, a tabloid sized piece of paper, it would take twice the number of pages – and in the days when newspapers had little news to report, comparatively, and would have to be collated by hand, that was an expense and an inconvenience one could do without, if one was a publisher. It was also convenient for the reader – with only one page; the entire newspaper could be folded over and held in one hand while read.

The problem with broadsheets is that they quickly became inconvenient when you added a second page. Folding the paper over produced problems, and the paper could easily become unbundled. Fast-forward about a century or two and today’s broadsheet newspapers seem to be designed with that one-page mentality still in mind. Compared to tabloids or the European “Berliner” style newspapers, broadsheets come in bundles of anywhere from 4-16 sheets or more, they come in a number of sections (more on that later.) Worse still, the format has become inconvenient to today’s modern life, hard to read on buses, subways, trains, and while carpooling. (I would not advise trying to read a newspaper while traveling in the passenger seat of a car – not unless you want the driver’s view of the road to be obscured by the leftmost side of page 2. In a pinch, though, they do make handy windshield sun blockers.)

So, why have newspapers in America not abandoned the broadsheet? Tradition and culture. Broadsheets are seen as the more intellectual of the two styles. It’s true that the New York Post, sensationalist and occasionally inaccurate is printed on a tabloid sheets and the New York Times is printed on broadsheets, so it can be said that, overall, broadsheets are more ‘respectable” than tabloids. But this is an entirely self-fulfilling prophecy – the only reason that broadsheets are more respectable is that respectable papers choose to print on broadsheets. If the New York Times, Washington Post and the like choose to print on tabloid paper, that myth would cease. We know it is a myth because the similar Berliner style has been used for papers like Le Monde, and the tabloid-formatted Guardian in Britain is in many circles better respected than the broadsheet London Times. Indeed, it as almost as if a tribal taboo has gripped the newspaper industry and held it firmly there – a superstition that tabloids are cursed and evil. Beware, for the measurement of 11 x 17 is the number of the beast!

Tabloids, or as Knight-Ridder calls them when they want to talk about switching to tabloid size without mentioning the word “tabloid,” compacts are indeed compact, easy to read, easy to travel with, and have many other qualities. There are many reasons a newspaper might continue to stick with broadsheets – not the least of which is the original reason of being able to get more news on a single page – but so long as the news remains the same, tabloids would be more convenient for urban readers without sacrificing quality.

Jumps

Jumps:

If there is one easy-to-solve irritation that newspapers uniquely possess, it is the use of jumps. Pick up just about any daily newspaper and you’ll find a front page loaded with the start – but not the finish – of articles. The ends of the articles are always inside the paper.

This makes a certain sort of sense – people who want a broad overview of the most important stories (or who haven’t decided to plunk down their money for an issue) can read the front page. The most important bits of the most important news are presented front and center. Which is fine if you’re just interested in the front page.

If you want more in-depth information, and you want to be able to read your stories from beginning to end, your newspaper experience is like thus: Read page one, flip to page 4, flip back to page one, read page 5, flip back to page one, read section B1, get redirected to B2.

This would be absolutely appropriate if one were reading a “choose-your-own-adventure” book and not the president’s latest domestic proposals, news from the front of the latest war, and some guy you’ve never heard of before who has suddenly been revealed to have given bribes to a high-ranking public official. Jumps make reading a newspaper cover-to-cover a gymnastic experience that requires reading the newspaper in a number of different possible orders, none of them linear from page A1 to page D30.

The jumps themselves interrupt the flow of a story as well – a mildly interested person who would otherwise read an entire story might not feel that they should be bothered with reading the whole story if it drops off mid-sentence (and that goes counter to the journalistic imperative to inform the reader as much as possible.) Flipping from page to page also requires a different mode of thinking – so while readers are trying to process a story, they are suddenly confronted with a manual dexterity and math-counting problem, not a different one, but it jars them out of that mode of thinking and it is more difficult to resume the news-processing thinking from before.

Bundling

Bundling:

This practices is probably the one with the clearest beneficial effects. It is still incredibly annoying. Within your typical broadsheet styled paper, there are sections for national news, local news, sports, classifieds, arts and leisure, and a number of different other sections. While it is possible that someone may read the entire paper, it is not likely. Some pick up the newspaper just for the sports section – some pick up the newspaper just for the local news, some pick it up to read the latest Doonesbury. Whatever the reason, a large portion of the newspaper is discarded like yesterday’s news among these readers.

It makes short term economic sense, after all, an advertiser who pays for an ad in the sports section pays per circulation, even if half the newspaper’s subscribers don’t read the sports section. But it makes for long-term annoyances – for most people, most of the newspaper is filler.

A direct analogy can be made in the music entertainment industry, which used a practice of putting out albums with perhaps one or two “hits” and a number of songs as “filler.” People would pay the inflated album price to hear the hits, instead of paying for the singles (which was phased out in the nineties to support this business model.) What happened to that model was Napster – when people were trading singles online, caring little for the “album” that produced it. People, when given a choice, will buy the wheat without chaff.

With the advent of online news, newspapers are in a similar situation. News consumers have a choice of going online and getting wheat only, or the mostly-chaff newspaper. And while there will always be people who prefer having tangible forms of music – CDs instead of MP3s, there will always be people who prefer tangible forms of news. Still, the music industry partially adapted by offering singles download services. The newspaper industry has yet to adapt.

The idea that advertisers will lose advertising revenue if newspaper sections were offered a la carte is a sound one – after all, if only 50 percent of customers opt to get the sports section, the ad is delivered to 50 percent of households. But advertisers already know that their work will be read by 50 percent, or whatever number, of their target market when they purchase a particular spot in the newspaper… or in other words, the local sports bar wants to be advertised in the sports section, IBM wants to be in the technology section, and the Atlantic Monthly wants to be in the news section. Advertising revenue should remain relatively constant. In the meantime, subscribers have to put up with less litter, they get the information that they want and don’t have to go through junk to get it.

Alternatively, papers could simply combine all the sections into a single fold, which would get rid of the “junk” problem.

Detachment

Detachment:

Now we begin to move away from publishing and marketing decisions towards editorial decisions.

The writing style of newspapers, is often a “just the facts” type interpretation of the news. The inverted pyramid style, while useful in many respects, places a premium on factual information and less of a premium on what those facts mean in the broader context.

More generally, though, it dehumanizes the paper. Reading a list of facts makes the news robotic. I would not say boring: reading “Hijackers fly two planes into WTC buildings; thousands killed” is factual. But it’s almost machine parse-able. Some days it sounds like journalists at most newspapers couldn’t even pass a Turing test. This emotional disengagement has traditionally been in the news. Only recently, however, has it been a major problem with news delivery.

A large section of the populace, especially the young, believes not only that there is no need to keep up with the news in order to govern a daily life, but that even if one did, the newsmakers were so insulated from public opinion there would be nothing that could be done about it.

This was not caused by the facts-only writing styles of newspapers, but the “facts-only” style of writing can help enforce that trend. In short, it seems as if newspaper reporters write the news without believing themselves that it matters. (This may actually be true.)

Note that journalists do not need to sensationalize, dumb-down, or switch from hard-to-soft leads in writing. All a journalist has to do in order to humanize the paper is to explain what will happen if no change occurs, how to change it, and to include more personal details in the story. If the story is on Social Security for example, and the proposed changes would affect a middle-class family of four, then find a middle class family of four to talk to.

More importantly, the tone of writing should be less of a lecture style of writing, and take on more conversational tones. It should feel like a human is writing it.

Dearth of political reporting:

Dearth of political reporting:

An additional part of the reason for emotional detachment is that many of the top stories in the local paper aren’t anything that people can do anything about, specifically crime stories and roadway accidents. There is very little one can civically do in most of these stories, barring the formation of a neighborhood watch in high-crime areas or installing a traffic light at a treacherous intersection. Many crime and accident stories are, however, not something that immediately calls for action.

While studying the Blogosphere in related work, I came across something I found quite unusual. The vast majority of Blogosphere stories were political in nature. Bloggers, supposedly, according to journalism luminaries such as Jay Rosen, journalism professor at NYU and Dan Gillmor, author of We the Media, represent citizen journalism. There should be, supposedly a pretty clear match between what the public wants news about and what blogs cover because blogs are the public. If this is true, then the very existence of the Blogosphere implies that people, rather than caught up in lurid, sensational details, tend to want more political information than provided.* This implies that there isn’t enough political information from other news sources to suit the public’s taste.

If I’m right, the move to increase the amount of entertainment coverage in order to retain readers for political coverage is actually counterproductive, and is doing the very opposite of what those who engage in this hope to do.

This is not to say that crime and accident stories shouldn’t be part of the news – it just means, perhaps, that “if it bleeds, it shouldn’t lead.”

The Breaking News Mentality and Depth

The Breaking News Mentality and Depth:

For untold centuries, the newspaper broke the news. They were the first on-call, the first to really research the story. As late as the 1970s, Woodward and Bernstein at the Washington Post proved the paper’s relevance in the age of television.

Although it’s hard to change tactics from an industry that still cannot grasp that it might be okay to change the size of the paper, newspapers no longer break the stories. For expected, visual events, television breaks the story, for other events, news Web sites – many of them owned and operated by traditional news media – break the stories before the print is on the streets.

I see this myself with The Daily Texan, where I worked the past six months as associate editor. The Daily Texan operates a website at www.dailytexanonline.com, and the website updates at around 1:30 am, before the next day’s paper is delivered to the ubiquitous orange Daily Texan news boxes. Since all the stories are available first, and I can access them by going to the website or accessing the RSS feed, I usually end up reading the stories printed first. I even got into a little bit of trouble – the editor, Ben Heath, was about to chastise me for writing about a letter to the editor in my blog before it was printed. It was true, I was up at 3:00 am that night, and decided to respond to it, but I only knew about the letter because the paper had already published it. Once I explained this, the editor was more understanding but still a bit nonplussed.

It’s clear these days that the New York Times Online can publish before the New York Times, Statesman.com can publish before the Austin American-Statesman, and blogs can often publish faster than anyone. There is just too much of a lag-time between when a story is written and when the paper literally threads through the machine and is delivered in order to break the news.

Yet, newspapers are still set up for breaking news – the inverted pyramid style, specifically is designed to catch a person up on the most basic and most important facts at the beginning of the story. But often, a person who has already read a story online will look at a newspaper and, seeing in the lead the first few facts — that he already knows — he will not likely read the rest of the article, even if the article contains more in-depth information than he has received online. (This is especially true if putting most of the article beyond a fold obscures the size of the text.)

Newspapers should move towards a more “newsmagazine” style of writing, (which should be very easy now that newsmagazines have moved to a “pop magazine” style of writing.) They should include context, and most importantly, history.

The people just picking up the news, whether because they’re young and reaching for a newspaper for the first time, or because they’ve been civically disengaged and seek to reengage themselves, will often not find the context in news stories.

For example, I’m trying to study New Zealand politics by reading the two major newspapers, the Dominion-Post of Wellington, and the New Zealand Herald of Auckland. Right now, the top story is about an MP named John Tamihere, and whether he may, or may not, have left some cats to starve.

Reading the article gave me no idea who the hell John Tamihere was, why his cats were important, and what impact this has on New Zealand politics. Reading more into the whole cats thing requires quite a bit of research from other places – indeed, it would be very tempting for me, or any other “alien observer” to stop the research altogether. After all, on the surface, it’s about cats.

Newspapers not only have to keep in mind that it’s less important for them to be fast than it is to be thorough, but that they also need to adopt a mandate that every issue of the paper is someone’s first issue of the paper. (Because most assuredly, the way things are going, every issue is somebody’s last.)

Newspaper companies can certainly remain in the “breaking news” business, but their best bet is to do so on their Web sites. Rather than having the Web site be an adjunct to the newspaper, perhaps businesses need to think very hard about developing the newspaper as an adjunct to the website.

The Truth Monopoly Mindset:

The Truth Monopoly Mindset:

Finally, newspapers need to realize that they are no longer the monopoly on truth. If they report incorrectly, or misleadingly, the information is out there. There was a day when a newspaper’s competition was the opposition newspaper in the same town – now a newspaper’s competition in most metro areas is both a monopoly (most cities only have one major newspaper) and a model of perfect competition, as people can access just about every newspaper that is printed online, and bloggers can cover the same beats. I can imagine that civic disengagement can’t help but be exacerbated by a situation in which the only choice for news is “buy the paper or not” and people will, of course, choose not. Now that there is an infinite possibility of news sources, newspapers need to solicit more information from readers, be quicker in response to corrections (and be more responsible about printing those corrections in the same context and the same general priority as the original story ran,) and be more responsive to what consumers are asking for.

This is not so much an “annoyance” of the newspaper as it is the ultimate barrier towards implementing solutions aimed at eliminating the other six annoyances.

Conclusion: The Ideal Paper

An ideal paper would likely look very different, possibly in tabloid or Berliner form. A large, single story would dominate the page – which would continue from page one to page two, and each story in the paper would flow seamlessly from the one before it. On the side, perhaps one column of a four-column layout, a list of all the story headlines, along with a page number which the stories are printed on. Politics, crime, accidents, and other stories would all be sequestered into different sections, with politics given the lion’s share of coverage. Sports sections would be sold separately or incorporated into the main bulk of the paper.

The ideal story would cover material in depth, provide a history of the item, solicit reader feedback on that particular story, provide information on how to get involved in the story, and be written in a conversational (but conforming to style) tone that explains the impact on society that the story has, as well as the impact on local people.

None of these are any guarantee that people will come back to newspapers. With the advent of the Web, it’s not even really that necessary to save newspapers as a medium (although newspaper companies have resources that web startups usually do not.) But if one wants to take advantage of any increase in overall civic engagement, it is important to not present barriers to participation in order to cater to tradition.