COMM 209: "Life After Newspapers ... if the [print] New York Times disappears, there will still be news."

Michael Kinsley, founding editor of the online magazine Slate.com and op-ed columnist for the print and online editions of The Washington Post, had a column Monday that I think is must reading for anybody who's thinking about a career in journalism. It's headlined "Life After Newspapers" ... and, in spite of the headline, it's optimistic.

I'll cut to the chase:

As many have pointed out, more people are spending more time reading news and analysis than ever before. They're just doing it online. For centuries people valued the content of newspapers enough to pay what it cost to produce them (either directly or by patronizing advertisers). We're in a transition, destination uncertain. [Political and public affairs blogger] Arianna Huffington may wake up some morning to find The Washington Post gone forever and the nakedness of her ripoff exposed to the world. Or she may be producing all her own news long before then. Who knows? But there is no reason to suppose that when the dust has settled, people will have lost their appetite for serious news when the only fundamental change is that producing and delivering that news has become cheaper.

It's worth reading in full.

Kinsley is a good guy to speculate about the future. After a distinguished print career as editor of The New Republic, he moved from New York to Seattle in 1996 and founded Slate, initially backed by Bill Gates and Microsoft Corp. He stepped down in 2002 for health reasons and now contributes to Slate and The Washington Post (which acquired Slate in 2004). So his conclusions are worth listening to. His conclusion to Monday's column:

Maybe the newspaper of the future will be more or less like the one of the past, only not on paper. More likely it will be something more casual in tone, more opinionated, more reader-participatory. Or it will be a list of favorite Web sites rather than any single entity. Who knows? Who knows what mix of advertising and reader fees will support it? And who knows which, if any, of today's newspaper companies will survive the transition?

But will there be a Baghdad bureau? Will there be resources to expose a future Watergate? Will you be able to get your news straight and not in an ideological fog of blogs? Yes, why not -- if there are customers for these things. There used to be enough customers in each of half a dozen American cities to support networks of bureaus around the world. Now the customers can come from around the world as well.

If General Motors goes under, there will still be cars. And if the New York Times disappears, there will still be news.

The italics are mine. I think Kinsley is absolutely right that the news media of the future will be a lot like the websites of today.

There's a fine article by Philip Meyer in last month's issue of The Quill, trade magazine of the Society of Professional Journalists, that puts a lot of this stuff in perspective. Meyer has been another pioneer, best known for using computers and digital databases for newspaper research, and his thoughts carry weight, too.

It's titled "Journalism History is Merely a List of Surprises." In it, Meyer looks into the future, and here's what he sees:

I believe there will be room for other kinds of specialized newspapers [in addition to politics and public affairs]. Sports and business sections will be broken out and sold separately like chicken parts at the grocery store. That will make print advertising a more efficinet buy than it has been because the advertiser won't have to pay for newsprint that goes unread. Community newspapers, specialized by definition, will coninuue to do fairly well.

A paradoxical development is under way, and that is the trend toward less specialization in the varius crafts of journalism. ... Now reporters are increasingly expected to come back from an assignment with notes, audio and visual recordings, both still and moving, and then upload and edit them in a variety of media forms."

Meyer's article is important, and it will be in Becker Library as soon as I get it over there (I donate my copies of the magazine). Bottom line: We read a lot of doom-and-gloom about the future of journalism, but there will always be jobs for good journalists. When I left academic life for the newspaper business in the 1970s, editors were looking for people who could "do it all." And they're still looking for the same kind of people. The media are changing, but people don't.