. . . without news

Here's a story that ran in the Times yesterday, putting in print the macabre parlor game of conjecturing which major city will be the first to have its newspaper fail. It sends a shiver down one's spine.

Of course, given the financial straits that many newspapers are in, it's not inconceivable that a big city (Seattle? Boston? San Francisco? Really?) could be without a daily newspaper. It's very hard to imagine what the news landscape would be like in that city, thought. I'm going to go ahead and say it would be a combination of Mad Max, the wedding dress sale at Filene's Basement, and the upcoming season of Real World/Road Rules Challenge.

I liked this article, though, because (even though it doesn't realize it), it wanders around the outskirts of one of the main problems with the newspaper world perspective:

Nearly every large paper in the country prints fewer pages and fewer articles, and many have eliminated entire sections. Bureaus in foreign capitals and even Washington have closed, and papers have jettisoned film criticism, book reviews and coverage of local news outside their home markets.

In the heady days of 20 percent profit margins, it made sense to start new sections about books, style, travel, food, et cetera. It made sense when the newspaper was the most convenient, most thorough source of current information. That's obviously no longer the case. The internet puts restaurant and book reviews, classified ads, ruminations on style, and pretty much everything a newspaper does, at a person's fingertips. Even the type of commentary that's the bread and butter of newspaper op-ed pages is on the way to being rendered obsolete. Why read Tom Friedman when there's an entire blogosphere filled with writers who are smarter than him?

Newspapers are paring down the functions that the internet renders redundant. News-gathering, of course, is not, and can not, be one of those functions. This is not to say that internet-based news outfits can't do a good job of reporting; they clearly can. Whether it's economically sustainable is yet to be seen. What I mean is that, going forward, established newspapers, if they want to survive, need to start looking at news as their niche, in the same way that classifieds are the niche of Craigslist and reviews are the niche of Yelp. As I've said before, and will surely say again, newspapers aren't in the paper business or the website business. They're in the news business. If the rest has to be made extraneous, oh well.

Then again, when you've got the coordinator of Columbia Journalism School's reporting and writing program saying things like "F*ck new media," maybe all might actually be lost.