News Deserts — Water, water, everywhere. Just open your eyes.
Next week I am going to be attending a virtual conference on “News Deserts” organized by the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University.
The official title of the conference is “Filling The Vacuum Left By Expanding News Deserts.”
Journalists love to throw around the term News Deserts, and it is certainly true that they are expanding. More than 2,000 local newspapers have closed since 2004. That is a problem. Newspapers in America are slowly going broke.
There’s a reason for this — they no longer generate the revenue they used to. And there’s a reason for that. First, almost no one under the age of 30 even bothers to read a printed newspaper any longer. And even people older than 30 spend a good deal more time online and watching video than they do reading.
According to the AC Nielsen company, and they should know, the average American now spends an astonishing 8 hours a day watching video and TV, and an equally astonishing 19 minutes a day reading.
Taking the paper online does not help much, as ad revenues for online have, for the most part, collapsed. Google and Facebook now account for 85% of all online ad revenue. Papers cannot compete.
So what are newspapers to do?
I don’t know what we are going to discuss in the online session, but I know what advice I will offer. The newspapers should expand their sources of revenue. They should focus on making money first. Journalism second. Because if there is no revenue, there is no journalism. It’s pretty simple. And there are lots of ways for newspapers to make money. Lots.
Here’s a pretty basic rule of journalism that they don’t teach at journalism schools, but they should. In fact, it should be day 1. If there’s no revenue, there’s no journalism. The money has to come first.
And were is there revenue?
Well, education for starters. People pay an astronomical $106,000 a year to attend Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism (my alma mater). That is nuts. Any good newsroom can provide a better journalism education than Columbia, trust me, I used to teach there. So start charging people for a journalism education that counts.
Years ago, I did a partnership with The Guardian (UK) to create The Guardian Media Academy in London. We took The Guardian into the education business. It worked. The revenue helped support the paper. Anyone can do this. Local papers can start a journalism educational wing — also photography, writing, video and lots of other stuff that they do.
But papers can do far more. There are buried treasures in the ‘back of the book’.
Everyone always focuses on the front page news stories — the fire, the robberies, or if you are very deep, the ‘investigative’ stories. Journalists worried about the future of local news alway ask, “who is going to cover the city council meetings?” That’s fine, but they should ask, “how are we going to pay for the reporter to cover the city council meetings?”
And the answer to that question is to all too often ignored ‘back of the book’ — that is, real estate, fashion, food, travel — stuff like that. Because there is a great deal of demand for that content — just not amongst your ever diminishing reads. That demand is on TV.
Think about it. Real Estate (HGTV), Food (The Food Network), Travel (The Travel Channel), Fashion (are you kidding me?). The content is all there, it’s just not in the right medium. So fix it.
Years ago, I sold one of my companies to Punch Sulzberger and became the President of New York Times Television. We made shows for cable. Lots of them. And where did the content come from? The paper! And how much does cable pay for a show? Well, let’s ballpark it at $250,000 per half hour. And they buy them in blocks of 13. HGTV just commissioned 450 episodes of House Hunters. Do the math. How hard to you think it is to produce a show like that? Seriously? This isn’t Watergate we’re talking about here. That will pay for a LOT of reporters.
So the potential to more than cover the cost of running the newspaper part is there. It’s just not where the people who run the newspaper think it is. But it’s there. So go make some money. It’s not a crime.
