What's wrong with newspapers?

Where to start with that question? It's been just over a year since I last worked for one. I have spent much of the last year convinced the problem was primarily a financial one. The people with their hands on the money at the major media companies have little real idea of how people actually read news, so they overreact to each new idea or new trend. When the internet came along, they rushed their newspapers online and tried to charge for them or at least make people sign up. When that didn't seem to recapture the eroding reader base, newspapers ran just as fast the other way and made everything free online. That worked -- lots of people started reading news online, but it brought to where we are today. Now, faced with life-or-death decisions, newspapers are itching to run the other way again and start charging for everything because they need revenue from somewhere, anywhere, fast.

As much as I have been encouraged by the democratization of news the internet has brought about -- anyone can report on anything at anytime -- I believe in paid content. You get what you pay for. If you want your news for free, you're going to get news of little or no monetary value produced by just anyone at anytime. Free news is good news, but news with a monetary value is better news. What I have said a few times during the past year as I was involved in attempts to create paid online news sites -- and even been quoted a couple times saying it -- is that the great myth of this age of journalism is that newspapers' free online content is actually free. It's not; it's subsidized.

A Denver Post print subscriber -- and despite the discouraging circulation trends of the past decade, there are still more than 200,000 of them -- is paying for the news others will read online for free. A truly free publication could not produce news with the depth, breadth and scope of that from a daily metro newspaper. The tipping point, at which too many of those paid print subscribers decide to stop subsidizing and want to be subsidized, hasn't been reached quite yet, but it's not far off. It's at that point most readers will understand what, exactly, free news looks like. That's when more and more local news will come from the only wire service to cover an event or a pool of local newspapers get together and share the content that just one produces. Five newspapers will each produce one story that all five newspaper use instead of five newspapers each producing their own versions of all five stories. Fewer stories online mean blogs that do not create their own original content but merely comment on what others report will have to start producing their own news or make it up. One way or the other, free news will begin to match the price people are willing to pay for it.

But there is another problem I had not really thought much about until I became more reader than editor, and it's the best answer to the question of what's wrong with newspapers. They suck.

I sat through focus groups with the Rocky Mountain News and heard what readers said they wanted from their newspapers. We responded. More local news, more entertainment news, more juicy news, more leads that bleed. In the process, we made newspapers increasingly irrelevant to the daily lives of readers because the truth is, the news that readers really want is the news they cannot imagine. If journalists are doing their job, they present the reader with a story that is new and unknown -- News. You cannot focus group surprise. Yet how often did the front page of both Denver newspapers on Monday mornings from September to December feature a photo from a Broncos game that ended at least 12 hours before anyone picked up a newspaper. Anyone who would have cared already knew how the game ended, but that was the top story, rather than actual News. So we trained readers to expect from newspapers what they already knew.

Is it any wonder people are less willing to pay for their news? Once I got over some of my bitterness from losing the Rocky and stopped blaming the Post outright -- it took a while, but I got there late last summer -- I subscribed to my former competitor for three months. My wife would bring the newspaper in when she left for work and I would pick it up, look at the front page, then set it aside. With rare exceptions, it ended up on the recycle pile without being opened. When the subscription ran out, I didn't renew and haven't missed it. It's not that I feel well informed without it. I just don't feel particularly less informed.

We spent so much time at newspapers in the past 10 years studying what readers want and trying to quantify taste, that the newspaper of today is a wholly focus-grouped production. Very few editors and reporters are making decisions based what they personally feel is important. They make decisions based on what they've been told is important or have come to expect as important, rather than what they, as a reader, might actually be interested in. The newspaper is not completely without news, but the gut journalistic instinct is so quickly eroding that decisions are being made for other journalists, not readers.

So that's what is wrong with newspapers. The problem is as much editorial as it is financial. Newspapers need to charge for news online to survive, but first they need news worth charging for.