The shape of news to come

The noosepaper is dead, long live the noosepaper — on line.

Newspapers are dying but journalism is evolving, an acclaimed science writer told a gathering of the techno-hip at South By South West Interactive Festival on Friday.

See them as old growth forests, says Steven Johnson.  Under its branches are growing “blogging, citizen journalism, Twittering and other Internet-age information sharing.”

He likes what he sees in the news business, though things are “ugly and going to get uglier” and “great journalists are going to lose their jobs and cities are going to lose their newspapers.”

How make it pay?  Supply nothing that’s free on line.  Ditch the printing, which is too expensive.  He’s not the first to say it, of course.

Expanding on it is a major on-line provider, International Data Group chairman Patrick McGovern, who told AFP, “Print editions are yesterday’s news.” 

It’s been that way since radio began delivering on-spot accounts — see Len O’Connor’s

A reporter in sweet Chicago on how radio news men were resented by pencil men in the late 40s.  Not to mention TV. 

But verba volant, as the Romans used to say — spoken words evanesce — while scripta manent — written words remain.  Internet makes it easy to save it all and lets you go back over the scripta right away.  Hence new ball game.

McGovern: Drop print and delivery costs and focus on digging out the hot local topics [my italics].  “Find out the scandal in the mayor’s office; what the police are up to, and those other things that people love to talk about.  . . . It is easier and much less costly to put it online.”

Scandal sells.  Chicago newsies dig it up quite nicely.  It’s the best thing they do, their raison d’etre in my view.  What if you had to log in to Tribco’s new blog Chicago Corruption (for a price) or Sun-Times’ new Cook County Dirt (ditto).  You wouldn’t?  For a fraction of what you pay for hard copy?

For $3.95 a month, I get a week-daily “Political Diary” from WSJ.com (Wall Street Journal), which never disappoints.  And because I put out that $3.95, automatically, on a card, I do not treat it lightly.  Not even Instapundit or Power Blog or Drudge Report gets that kind of attention from me.  Tribco and S-T could get that kind of attention if they were good enough, which I think they are in digging for metropolitan dirt.

Indeed,

McGovern believes people will pay monthly subscriptions for online newspapers solidly tapped into their communities.

“I think people realize that if they are not paying for the information there will not be much investment in the information,” McGovern said.

Yes.

Back to Johnson in Austin TX (the South By South West venue), who carries it several steps further.  He

sees the future of news weaving together talents of professional journalists, bloggers, and people using social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter to instantly tell what is happening around them.

In some future utopia that collaboration.  The hostility of pros vs. bloggers is equal only to Sun-Times’s vs. Chi Trib in this blessedly two-newpaper metropolitan area, as in a self-congratulatory editorial in the former a few weeks back which crowed:

No army of bloggers, no TV or radio station, no nonprofit journalism collective, no foundation-supported task force of political and government reporters will ever do the job so well.

Too defensive by half.

Johnson theorized, however:

“If only there were some institution that had a reputation for integrity and a staff of trained journalists that had thousands of people visiting their websites every day.”

Those institutions are newspapers, Johnson noted, adding that an Internet-age motto of newspapers should be “All the news that fit to link.”

You could sell that.