Take your head out the sand, Peter Bruce

September 18th, 2009

Business Day editor Peter Bruce had a go in his column on Monday at the head of First National Bank for suggesting to his staff that they should stop their newspaper subscriptions - costing over R1-m a year - and read it all online. Bruce was being - I am afraid - struthious.

Bruce said someone had to pay for the journalism they found online - the best of which still comes from newspapers - and suggested that the bank should care more about the future journalism, and the harm that will befall us if it disappears.

Nobody loves newspaper more than I do, but there are a couple of hard realities Bruce needs to face up to:

- Newspapers will not be saved by expecting banks to subsidise them
- If newspapers are to survive, they have to show they bring a value that is worth paying for, above what one can get online for free or near-free

Bruce is correct to worry about journalism. Matthew Buckland responded to him by saying that journalism was flourishing on the internet, but I cannot easily agree with him. It is true that the Web brings us an exciting new form of participative, interactive journalism, and it is true that it promises a much more democratic, open form of journalism, but most of its news still comes from traditional newsrooms and without these we will not have too much in-depth, investigative reporting. Until we have a better financial model for internet journalism, we need to worry. I am certain we will eventually find this model, but in the meantime newsrooms are shrinking and there is less and less substantial journalism of the kind that made newspapers so central a part of community, city and national life.

And we are not going to get there by asking banks to subsidise us in the meantime.

I am concerned that newspapers like Bruce’s are in a self-defeating downward cycle. They are cutting their newsrooms to survive, and have less and less hard journalism in them, at a time when they most need to prove to the world that they offer real value and are worth paying for.

I do not mean to target Bruce here. His paper is better than most, and he has fought a sterling battle to minimise editorial cutbacks. He stands heads and shoulders above some of the editors in town who have not hesitated to slash and burn to the point where their newsrooms are barely newsrooms, and their newspapers more and more like mushy entertainment and lifestyle magazines.

But newspapers will only survive if we show they offer enough value to merit the extra cost. And that is harder and harder in a world where the internet multiplies one’s choices, and costs so little to produce and distribute, and newspaper newsrooms are shrinking every year.

Smart, non-struthious editors are experimenting with ways to make online journalism work and changing their newspapers to ensure they survive the change in readership patterns and needs. Smart owners would be investing more in this. Newspapers - like all media before them which faced new technological challenges - will survive, but only if they adapt quickly to a different world.

It is noteworthy that Business Day does not have a significant web presence. That is something Bruce can fix - with a greater chance of success than trying to get bank managers sentimental about newspapers.

Entry Filed under: Anton Harber, Journalism, Print