Death of the Newspaper

I was saddened to see the demise of the Rocky Mountain News which published their last edition today after 150 years in business. This got me thinking and in discussion with friends of mine about the future of the newspaper and news organizations in general.

What happened? First, news organizations lost their way. Somewhere over the past couple of decades, news organizations stopped reporting just the news and started reporting opinion. News was and continues to be who, what, where, how, when. Once the reporter begins to provide opinion, it is no longer news. The problem over the last several decades is just about everything in a paper now has opinion. If I want opinion, I can walk down the street and get it for free. Indeed, if I have the right Twitter friends, I get opinion unsolicited.

Once news organizations moved from providing the simple who, what, where, how, and when, their value decreased. (Understand, opinion is important, but it should be labeled as such and should be segregated from "pure" news.) Second, news occurs real time. Newspapers occur periodically. Therefore, news is not longer news by the time a paper is published. The result is that the newspaper was forced to provide something a breaking news source could not provide--context and opinion. The problem with opinion is you can get it anywhere. The result has been decreasing revenue, particularly when alternative news sources have grown.

Second, social media have taken the place of both news reporting and opinion and editorial. With the advent of blogs, everyone can have an opinion. With newspapers, not everyone has their opinion published. Not so with blogs. It is your blog and you always get your opinion published (even if no one reads it). Blogs also allow individuals (in many cases experts in the field) to write about what interests them. The problem with opinion? First, everyone has them, second an opinion can't be wrong--only agreed or disagreed with, and third, opinions and fact are very different things.

The result is that newspapers (and to a lesser extent, radio and TV news organizations) have found a troubling truth--news can't be owned. News is available to the first individual or organization to find it. This was evidenced by the USAir emergency landing in the Hudson River. The first photo from the scene was a TwitPic posting through the social media micro-blogging site Twitter from an individual with an iPhone. Increasingly, this is seen in a variety of news venues--photos of storms on local TV weather reports, crash photos published across the Web, and Twitter and SMS messages from terrorist attacks. This type of news cannot be duplicated by the print media. In many cases, if the immediate resources are not available, it cannot be duplicated by radio and TV media.

This type of news is an immediate unfolding of the who, what, when, where, and why. Newspapers abdicated this news venue decades ago. What remains to be seen is the development of technologies for evaluating "factness" of news. the Digg Web site doesn't do it. The Snopes Web site lags the event by too much for evaluation breaking news. I predict that this area is the next big development in information management of news.

What is your opinion? We'd love to hear from you.