Wanted (needed): a new model for news

What if the problem with the news business is the news itself?

For all the hand-wringing and lamentations, the unavoidable truth is that many people have stopped buying news products. Half of all newspaper subscribers have vanished in the past 15 years.

It happened with horse-drawn buggies. It happened with ice boxes. It happened with wire-line telephone service.

But the fates of those products weren’t intertwined with the fate of democracy. News is.

And they’re both headed downhill. Numerous studies have documented declines in citizen engagement in areas that have lost newspapers. You don’t need studies to recognize the political polarization of the nation.

The decline of the news business is not a mystery: The flood of information delivered by the internet rocked both the business and editorial sides of news enterprises. Classified advertising disappeared as a revenue source. Print display advertising crashed. Subscriber levels melted away.

In response, publishers slashed costs, decimating newsrooms and diminishing the quality of their product. And newsrooms, operating at a fraction of the size of their glory days, found themselves in competition with … everything.

Consumers now are awash in an endless supply of free news. Its quality and accuracy may be wildly uneven, but it’s fast and — did I mention? — free. There’s also more non-news competition than ever, reaching people in places and at times news once held more sway: Streaming services displaying movies on 70-inch screens at home, online games, social media — all compete for the time and attention of potential news consumers.

Then there’s the smart phone: any content we want, wherever we are.

Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen wrote in 2012: “The wealth of information available almost instantaneously has lowered the value of the general interest news story such that it’s often less than the cost of production. General interest and breaking news reporting comprised of answering the ‘who, what, when and where’ has become commoditized. It cannot create enough value to sustain a news organization in the long term.”

In the face of that onslaught from market forces, journalists and their advocates beseech readers to subscribe to the publications of their choice, pointing out, reasonably enough, that quality journalism requires quality journalists. Which is to say, paid.

And we need quality journalism, they say, to play the critical role of keeping citizens informed.

They’re not wrong about that, but it’s a little disingenuous. It doesn’t take much more than a cursory glance at most newspapers to recognize they are not primarily democracy-support services. They are businesses producing narratives intended to capture our attention during our leisure time.

Yes, some of that content is fuel for a functioning democracy. But by tomorrow, that critical-to-democracy story will have moved from the top of the home page to the bottom, then to the section index, then to a netherworld known only to the search box. In its place will be something new — if we’re lucky, another critical-to-democracy story. But it’s equally likely to be an attention-grabbing story whose only virtue is its novelty, distracting us, and, perhaps, leaving us with a slightly more distorted view of our world.

Or perhaps they’ll offer us another cicada story. That wouldn’t actually be new, but analytics show we’ll read another cicada story, and woe the editor who cannot think of a new cicada angle.

Regardless, even the most significant stories, served to us in scattershot fashion and without a broader frame of reference, rarely offer insight into how they connect to the rest of our lives. That’s not their function.

The first job of journalists is finding something new, every day, to get and hold our attention — not serving the needs of citizens, not saving democracy. Those are incidental benefits, on good days. It’s trickle-down democracy.

But it’s no longer profitable.

Yes, the venerable New York Times is successful — and building on that success by investing more in games and puzzles, by the way — but the Times is an outlier.

According to a Knight Foundation/University of North Carolina report, 2,100 newspapers — one-fourth of the nation’s total — have closed in the past 15 years. A good number of the survivors have so few resources they are something closer to “ghost” newspapers. Half of all journalists have left the business in that time.

The hunt is on for new economic models and new sources of revenue — efforts both admirable and likely quixotic. They are attempts to treat the symptoms, looking for money to prop up an editorial model — one built around the news production and delivery logistics of the 19th century — that is no longer profitable on its own.

Yet we live in an information society; the uses to which we put news are more valuable to us than ever.

Christensen, in his 2003 book “The Innovator’s Solution,” described what he called the law of conservation of attractive profits: “The law states that when modularity and commoditization cause attractive profits to disappear at one stage in the value chain, the opportunity to earn attractive profits with proprietary products will usually emerge at an adjacent stage.”

So, is there still money to be made in news? What is that “adjacent stage”?

We might start by understanding the uses to which people put news, beyond reading it in the odd available moment. How do they use news to add value to their lives? We then might organize news and information around the needs of individual users — as citizens and members of a community.

News products could be purpose-driven, dynamic user guides to our neighborhoods, our broader communities, our states, and the nation.

Our new news product could assess, community by community, what our common purposes are, and what public priorities those purposes suggest. This new service could track progress on those priorities, engaging users with just-in-time information only when it might be relevant to them — but organizing that information to make it easily accessible at all times.

Our new product would in fact be a democracy-support service — one that doesn’t just offer a daily report of “what’s new,” but rather organizes all the relevant information available, priority by priority, public goal by public goal, for the use of its users.

To be clear, the traditional narrative approach to news and analysis will always be with us; in the right context, to meet certain needs, there is no better way to explain the world around us. But the news industry’s unswerving devotion to that one framework demonstrates an unyielding demand for readers’ time in a world of almost limitless options — a business failure — and a lack of understanding of the information needs of those users — an editorial failure.

Our new service would recognize the flood of news we confront every day, and offer users value without demanding more time in return. We depend on such assistance in other, far more mundane parts of our lives, and think nothing of paying for it. Why not have a service that tracks and organizes our community needs and obligations: the quality of our neighborhoods, our schools, our public services? Such a service, such an added value, might induce users to pay.

And, yes, our service could still include cicada stories. Because … we like cicada stories.

This originally appeared in May as the column One Dog Barking in Citizencartwright.com — hence the cicada references.