Is The Internet Killing Newspapers? Something Else To Thank Al Gore For?

Philip Stone December 19, 2007

If there is any one politician the world can thank for ensuring that America embraced the Internet it is probably Al Gore. During his political life, and especially as vice-president in the Clinton administration, he moved Congress, and the federal government, to adopt and accept the infant that he called the information highway.

As he said some eight years ago in a Larry King interview, “During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.”

That actually caused some jest for people then quoted the Vice President as saying he invented the Internet and that was not what he meant. Riding to his rescue, however, were the Internet’s two main architects, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, who issued a statement, “as the two people who designed the basic architecture and the core protocols that make the Internet work, we would like to acknowledge VP Gore's contributions as a Congressman, Senator and as Vice President. No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time….

“We don't think, as some people have argued, that Gore intended to claim he ‘invented’ the Internet. Moreover, there is no question in our minds that while serving as Senator, Gore's initiatives had a significant and beneficial effect on the still-evolving Internet. The fact of the matter is that Gore was talking about and promoting the Internet long before most people were listening.”

Gore, of course, has moved on from Internet promotion to winning a Nobel Prize, an Oscar and an Emmy and other awards for his work on protecting the environment. The Internet is a global success, used by billions around the world. It is yet another achievement for which he should feel very proud.

One by-product of the Internet’s popularity is that it gives the public at large more information choice for where and how they get the information of most interest to them, and it is not news to state that newspapers, more than almost any other news medium, have felt the financial pressures of that Internet success. In the “if you can’t beat them, join them” syndrome newspapers the world over have built and are continually improving their own web sites with the certain knowledge that at some point in the future – no one really knows when but it may well be within the next 10 years – that revenue from digital operations may well exceed those from print.

So, perhaps it is a fair question to ask – is the Internet killing the print newspaper?

For the answer we turn to a truly revealing speech given recently by New York Times editor Bill Keller in the UK. There was little about the state of the industry today that Keller didn’t cover but his comments on the future of print are of particular interest.

“As has been widely reported, many daily newspapers are staggering from an exodus of subscribers, a migration of advertisers to the web, and the rising costs of just about everything. Newspapers are closing bureaus and hollowing out their reporting staffs. “At places where editors and publishers gather, the mood these days is funereal. Editors ask one another, ‘How are you?’ in that sober tone one employs with friends who have just emerged from rehab or a messy divorce.

“A journalism professor at the University of North Carolina, named Philip Meyer, has done some studies about the decline of American newspaper readership. His extrapolation of the data shows that, if newspapers do nothing to change their ways, they will lose their very last reader in the year 2044. In October, if you want to mark your calendars. “On the stock exchanges, the value of newspaper shares has declined. Of the dwindling number of quality titles in the US, several are being bought up by new owners who seem completely free of nostalgia for the idea of journalism as a public trust.

“It is possible to find a silver lining in the fact that billionaires are lining up to buy newspapers. Sam Zell, the colorful real estate mogul who is in the midst of acquiring a proud chain that includes the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, recently told an interviewer, ‘All I can tell you is that for a dead industry with no future, there are an awful lot of schmucks who want to take it away from me!’ As a shareholder, I'd like to take heart from that thought, but as an editor I'll wait until I see what Mr. Zell and his peers actually do with their new trophies…

“For all of the woes besetting our business, I believe with all my heart that newspapers - whether they are distributed to your doorstep, your laptop, your iPhone or a chip implanted in your cerebral cortex - will be around for a long time. Newspapers, including at least a few very good newspapers, will survive, simply put, because of that basic law of market economics: supply and demand. The supply of what we produce is sadly diminishing. And the demand has never been greater.

“I probably don't have to convince this audience that there is a demand for news. People crave trustworthy information about the world we live in. Some people want it because it is essential to the way they make a living. Some want it because they regard being well-informed as a condition of good citizenship. Some want it because they want something to exchange over dinner tables and water coolers. Some want it so they can get the jokes on the late-night TV shows. There is a demand, a market, for journalism.

“And I would argue that in this clattering, interconnected, dangerous world, journalism that cuts through the noise has never been needed more. We have a war going very badly in Iraq, and another one in Afghanistan where our declaration of victory looks very premature. We have nuclear Pakistan on the brink of chaos. We have an America whose standing in the world is at low ebb. We have a global terror threat that makes us wish for the simple enmities of the Cold War - although anyone who follows Russia these days has to think, be careful what you wish for. We have, at last, a consensus that our climate is warming at a dangerous pace. North Korea has joined the club of nuclear nations, and Iran seems determined to follow [the speech was given prior to the recent US intelligence opinion that Iran is not working on a nuclear weapon]. Technology and demographics have rocked the foundations of many industries (not just my own). We have new leadership in Britain, France and Germany, among other places. In America we have the most interesting presidential campaign since at least 1968 - possibly the first campaign with more candidates than voters. We have Darfur. Hugo Chavez. China and India.

“In other words, something is happening out there, and if we don't understand it, it's not just the newspaper business that is in peril. And at this time of desperate need for reliable news reporting, the supply is dwindling.”

And his conclusion: “So, my confidence in our future depends on the continuing vitality of the printed paper, the entrepreneurial energy we have unleashed at our website, but above all it depends on one other thing. While some newspaper companies are cutting the heart out of their core business, our company continues to invest in it. At least twice in my lifetime The New York Times has seemed to be on the verge of extinction - once, during the New York City financial crisis of the mid-1970s, and again during the deep national recession of the late 1980s. Both times my paper resisted the temptation to panic. It invested in new things, it adapted, and it flourished. I believe that this time, too, newspapers that stay true to their mission will endure. In the end, I believe the gravest danger to the future of newspapers is not a hostile administration in Washington, not the acid rain of criticism, not a business model upended by new technology, it is a loss of faith, a failure of resolve on the part of the people who make newspapers.

“The curse of a journalist is that he always has more questions than answers. A question at least as interesting as 'will we survive?' is, how will the new medium change us? There is no doubt that as we manipulate the medium, it manipulates us back, so that for someone in my job the challenge is not just to generate revenues, but to retain the best qualities of the New York Times.” How do we meet a deadline every minute, while giving our reporters the time for depth, reflection and analysis? How, in a medium built for snap judgment, do we make time for that "agonized indecision" ? How do we conjoin text with video and audio without becoming, like much of television news, a slave to the loudest and most garish stories? How do we succeed in a world where every click is measured, without succumbing to the pull of ratings and neglecting the important, complicated story that lacks sex appeal?”

Regretfully he didn’t answer his own questions, but the newspaper industry’s coming up with the right responses are the clue to why  the Internet will not kill newspapers, and the two will learn to live side-by-side.

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