The last gasp of the Luddites

Video game curmudgeon and ephebophile Agnostic has spent the better part of the past couple of weeks furiously jacking off to the news that a group of newspapers will begin charging for access to their online content. He seems to think that this will somehow “sav[e] journalism” – as if journalism was worthy of being saved. The concept that online subscriptions will save the newspaper industry is, to anyone with an idea of how newspapers work, completely and utterly absurd.

The success of Journalism Online (the group leading the effort to push online subscriptions) and its purported mission rests on the ability of subscription fees to cover the costs of running newspapers. Implicit in this is the assumption that newspapers derive the majority of their income from subscriptions to the print edition, and the availability of articles online for free has cut circulation and thus income. This assumption is false, and has been for at least a hundred years. Modern newspapers derive two-thirds of their income from print advertising (source: Exploring Mass Media for a Changing World) – subscription fees are a minor part of their earnings. That’s why it’s possible for dailies like am New York as well as “alternative newspapers” to be completely free of charge. The crisis that newspapers face is not a result of their content being offered online for free, but websites like Craigslist cutting into their advertising dollars. That’s the reason why print journalists and editors hate Craigslist with a passion, and why they always jump to publish hit pieces on the site whenever they can. Journalism Online’s plan to rejuvenate the dead tree news industry isn’t grounded in anything resembling reality.

There are newspapers that have successfully implemented online subscription schemes, and Agnostic names two: the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. Thing is, as I wrote here, the WSJ, and by extension the FT, can get away with charging for its online content primarily because it targets a specific niche (the business community) and also happens to have a near monopoly on news for that niche. Newspapers such as the New York Times don’t target any specific group and don’t offer anything that can’t be obtained from another source. If the NYT was to disappear tomorrow, there are literally dozens of other sources of news that people could replace it with, from other papers to local TV and radio. In the age of the Internet, the average media outlet is disposable.

Finally, both Agnostic and Journalism Online don’t even take into consideration the rampant growth of online piracy in the past few years. Part of the reason that TimesSelect, the New York Times’ online subscription program, flopped (which, by the way, Agnostic COMPLETELY FAILS TO MENTION in any of his rants) was because most of the subscription-only content was stolen and thrown up on blogs and websites where people could read it for free. Have any of these idiots heard of BitTorrent or LimeWire? The RIAA, MPAA, ESA and other media interest groups have been entirely unable to keep people from illegally downloading music, movies, and games from P2P networks and torrent websites. The anti-P2P groups are retreating on all fronts – file-sharing is now legal in Canada, and the Pirate Party recently won a seat in the European Parliament. What’s going to stop people from ripping worthwhile articles from subscription newspapers and putting them up on the web? Nothing. Trying to fight online piracy is like one person trying to play Whack-a-Mole with one mallet and a trillion moles.

Forcing people to pay for newspaper articles will not save the papers. The Internet has done to the journalists what the Industrial Revolution did to the British textile workers in the early 19th century – made most of them obsolete. Journalists are the Luddites of our time, desperately trying to fight the winds of progress that are sweeping them into the cesspit of history. But like how the Luddites failed to halt the changes that made them irrelevant, all of the posturing from groups like Journalism Online is not going to make things go back to the way they were.

In order to stay afloat, newspapers are going to have to change their entire business models. My suggestions:

• Decentralize. As I commented at Half Sigma’s:

In the age of the Internet, high-speed broadband, and Skype, there’s less of a need to have employees report to a central office every day. Reporters could as easily do their jobs from home, communicating with their bosses over the phone and Internet. With fewer people hanging around the office, less space is needed.

Get rid of op-ed columnists. This is the age of high-speed broadband and Blogger. When anyone can make their thoughts known on the Internet, there’s no need to pay some blowhard tens, hundreds of thousands of bones a year to produce opinion pieces that no one reads. Think about it: how many newspaper op-ed columnists could you truly live without? The only one I read is Pat Buchanan, whose stuff can be found online on his own website and others like Taki’s Magazine, @TAC, WorldNetDaily, and VDARE.com. The sooner dumbasses like Maureen Dowd get canned and have to find real jobs, the sooner the papers can move on. Focus exclusively on local content. Again, in the Internet era, anyone can get national/international headlines from anywhere. Local content is what distinguishes one media outlet from the next. As Whiskey commented here on the decline and fall of the LA Times:

Local news and content was ignored in favor of NYT style coverage of stuff of little to no interest to LA readers: stuff happening in NYC’s social elite, etc.

Chuck characterized the Steveosphere as an “intellectual circle jerk,” which is unfortunately accurate. As much as I love the Steveosphere (hell, I could be considered an outer orbiter in it, as I’ve dabbled in quantblogging from time to time), the sort of half-assed thinking displayed by Agnostic on this issue is all too common amongst its denizens. As Geoffrey Falk raged here:

The combination of ignorance, arrogance and one-dimensional thinking in the B-grade Steveosphere is truly something to behold: People presuming to teach and dis others, without having bothered to properly understand even the basics of the subjects they’re pontificating about.

A suggestion, guys: if you want to be taken seriously, GET YOUR FUCKING RESEARCH RIGHT. And Agnostic, I like your blog and everything, but you should really stick to what you know - swooping teenage girls.

PROGRAMMING NOTE: My promised Byron piece will be up sometime tomorrow.