Downie Says Newspapers Must Constantly Look For New Revenue Streams
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Former Washington Post Executive Editor Len Downie said there won't be one
solution to the current newspaper crisis. (©Mark Evitt)
Former Washington Post Executive Editor Len Downie said Thursday there was no "silver bullet" to fix the problems newspapers faced with declining revenues and staffs.
"We obviously are in a crisis in the American news business right now, a terrible, terrible crisis," Downie said.
But at a talk at the Annenberg School for Communication, Downie said new media outlets wouldn't replace the role of newspapers.
"In some places the new ways of doing journalism are going to replace the old ways, but not necessarily by eliminating traditional journalism," Downie said. "It's traditional journalism alongside what you can have on the web. They're not incompatible."
While publications like Politico, which publishes primarily online, have pushed the envelope in the way news is covered in Washington, Downie said the two-year-old publication's real test will come now that buzz from the election has died down.
"They do a really good job of marketing," Downie said. "They've got themselves on television a lot; they've created a lot of buzz about themselves. Which I think exceeds their accomplishments so far. I hope they succeed. It's just difficult to succeed over the long run."
Downie, who has worked at the Post since 1964 and served as executive editor between 1991 and 2008, will be joining the faculty at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University this fall.
Senior News Editor Mark Evitt spoke with Downie about fat-and-happy newspapers, the difference between newspapers and newsrooms, and how too many people think of solving the journalism problem in either/or terms.
Politico is practicing a singular style of reporting, and it's gaining traction. Does this new, more aggressive form of reporting mean the Post will have to change how it reports in Washington?
Not necessarily, because there are all kinds of different styles in journalism. We're not the New York Times, the New York Times isn't like us. Politico does have a certain mission and a certain style, and it does a lot of marketing, which is really important for the Internet. Gaining brand recognition, which we already have, obviously. But they've built it in a very smart way. And they're in an area where there are a lot of specialized readers. It will be interesting to watch their numbers now that the election is over, and pretty soon the transition will settle down. And it will be interesting to see if their numbers hold up in the day-to-day coverage of Washington. The challenge for them is to make this a long-term sustainable business.
In this election cycle, what was done differently in terms of coverage that hadn't been done before? Was there something that news organizations were doing differently, or was it the nature of the campaign that was resulting in so much interest?
It was the nature of the campaign, the current situation of the country, and the fact that there are more news organizations than ever before, as well as participation on the web, with blogs and so-on. There was just more media engagement, media in the broadest terms, citizen media, there was more available than ever before to engage people.
You were the editor on the metro desk when Watergate happened. With newspapers cutting budgets, is Watergate-style reporting going to exist any more?
It does exist. Our stories revealing CIA secret prisons, our Walter Reed stories, all are similar. It goes on all the time. What would be different if Watergate occurred now is we wouldn't be alone on the story. With the Internet, everyone would be involved. There would be a lot more commentary about it. Everything would be speeded up all the time. The coverage of [former Illinois Governor Rod] Blagojevich is a good example. The stories happen fast. There is so much more media, moving faster, on these kinds of stories.
There's a certain type of story that will become a most-e-mailed story. Often it isn't hard-hitting journalism. How do newsrooms balance covering that type of story and ones that are quote journalism?
You need to look every day at what our most-viewed stories are, more than most e-mailed stories, because that's a subset and a much smaller group. You'll find that most of them are important stories. They are the same stories we would be giving prominence to anyway. Occasionally there'll be one that is a bit off-beat that becomes viral, but it is not about Britney Spears, it's just a really interesting human-interest story, or it's Walter Reed, which remains to this day our most read and e-mailed story, so we're not dumbing down the media in terms of what's popular on the Web.
The surprise and the challenge about web traffic is that opinion is much more popular than in print. In print newspapers opinion was by-and-large contained to the editorial page and the op-ed page. On the web opinion is big. That's what blogs are all about, and the opinion parts of our site have very high readership. If there's something I worry about, it's that people's preference for opinion over hard news.
When you announced you were going to be retiring in June of last year, you got a lot of state-of-the-media questions. Things have changed pretty dramatically since then, in six to eight months, and it feels like the bottom has dropped out almost. Do you respond to state-of-the-media questions differently now?
Things are evolving very rapidly. To use your phrase, the bottom has dropped out of the economic model for the news media. But at the same time, there is so much innovation going on that I wouldn't have expected. These Internet-only site start-ups, non-profit journalism of all different kinds, university involvement in journalism, there are a lot of different things going on, and if you focus only on the fate of news media companies, and think of them as a whole, is mistaking what's going on. There will be survivors among news media companies, they will be different than they were before, they will evolve.
We had this golden age of newspaper journalism, which fortunately was the arc of my career, but that's over, and we're entering something new. And it's not all bad. There are a lot of exciting opportunities.
But your average Internet site has tens of reporters, dozens if you're lucky. The Slate Group, which is owned by the Washington Post, is expanding, but it's staff is still relatively small.
Except washingtonpost.com has hundreds of reporters, and so does nytimes.com. The most-visited news Web sites are still mainstream news media outlets with very large staffs. So again it's not one or another, it's a combination of the two. The success of one thing doesn't mean the failure of the other.
Smaller sites would say they also draw on their readers to play a part in the editorial process.
Up to a point they do, but they also link to us all the time. They link to the mainstream media. If the mainstream media disappeared, you would probably lose a certain amount of readership on blogs and things like that because they link to us all the time. It's not an either/or proposition.
After the election, many people went out and bought a hard copy of the paper. People were saying, "Oh this shows that newspapers aren't dead." It seemed to me like this showed that people now treated the newspaper as something you only bought once and a while, to document something historic.
Yes, and its importance should not be exaggerated. But on the other hand, people use the newspaper like that every day too, when they cut out recipes and things like that. People are doing the same type of thing on the web. People are constantly printing out things that they're reading on the web. It's not that they don't want hard copies of things; when they want to save something they make a hard copy. Some people live entirely on their Blackberrys and never print anything, but most people will print out something they want to keep.
Our newspaper office now is completely computerized, but reporters still have stacks of newspapers on their desks, it's just that now the stacks are print-outs from their computers. So human beings are savers of things. Hard copy is still an important role. Unless you come along with a technology that's going to feel like hard-copy, there's still going to be hard-copies. Not as many print newspapers, maybe different than they were before, but there will be other kinds of hard copies of journalism.
I'm not concerned about the fate of the printed newspaper. I'm concerned about the fate of newspaper newsrooms. Because those are the newsrooms that are doing the reporting than no one else is doing. That's my concern. I don't care how it's being published. So many people who are either afraid about the future of newspapers or are gleeful about the future of newspapers are missing the point. It's not the way in which it's presented, it's the news itself that matters.
Does it make sense for papers to cut print circulation entirely and get a lot of revenue savings up front instead of slowly chopping away at staff?
Again that's an either/or question when it's not necessary. What the Post is doing is we're charging more money for the printed newspaper. We should have done that before. We were just too slow. The Washington Post was 25 cents until just a short time ago. Now it's 75 cents; it will be a dollar soon. And that will cover more of those costs for the printed newspaper.
I think the most sophisticated argument in this area is not to get rid of print circulation entirely, but to cut print circulation down to the core audience that wants printed newspaper. A certain percentage of our core audience -- a surprisingly high percentage of it, we're talking highly educated, well-compensated people, who if they're retired they are well off -- do not read news on the Web. Should tomorrow we tell them to go away? I don't think so. I don't think that's good citizenship, and I think it would be bad business. So the question is what is the balance between your print audience and your web audience.
Do you think too many people worried about the state of journalism operate in either/or terms?
I go to these conferences where people say "Ok, get rid of the newspapers, it ought to be citizen reporting." OK, well if that happens tomorrow, we're going to be ignorant in this country. It's going to be bad. On the other hand, people say "Bloggers, they're irresponsible, we should get rid of them." Well that's stupid too, because they enrich our knowledge of things. They enrich our opinion of things.
What I'm looking for in the study I'm doing are not silver bullets or panaceas, but those things that ought to be encouraged and those things that look like they're not going to go anywhere. And I think it will be a big combination of things that is going to be our future. I'm still very worried about how much that future is going to contain newsrooms of sufficient size and ability to do the kind of accountability journalism that is required.
And you think size is the most important?
Well it depends on what your mission is. For Slate size is not that important, because Slate has a more confined mission. In all cases quality is more important than size. But it depends on what you mission is. For the Washington Post, a certain size is necessary to our mission because we cover a fair-sized metropolitan area. And the nation's capital, and things of interest to the nation's capital like international news. That requires a certain size.
How successful have the Post's hyper-local sites been?
Not very successful in our case, because we are a very large metropolitan area. There is not very much identification for people who live in one county compared to people who live in another. So your audience is only narrowly in that one county. If you're in Lawrence, Kansas that hyper-local site is a big success, because everyone in Lawrence is in Lawrence together. It's a very cohesive community. We're spread out. We thought having a bunch of hyper-local sites would be very important to our future, and while we created a very good one in Loudoun County, Virginia, it didn't draw an audience or advertising big enough to tell us we should change drastically how we should cover our area. People turn to us for regional news, not hyper-local.
My hometown paper, the San Jose Mercury News, isn't the paper it once was -- it's been stripped bare. But it also isn't a paper that can take the hyper-local angle. What do papers like that do?
The Mercury News was a very strong paper. It was the best paper in the Bay Area, and really did such a great job with Silicon Valley, and obviously what's happened with Silicon Valley has also affected the San Jose Mercury News. I just would have to study more what's going on there, or any place like that, to figure out what decisions they ought to make. Clearly something is going to happen in the Bay Area because no newspaper in the Bay Area is doing well. There are just too many daily metropolitan-like newspapers for one area.
What the answer for the San Jose Mercury News is, I don't know. It would be interesting to own all of those papers and then figure out what you're going to do with them.
Newspapers are figuring out how to do more with less. Do you think basically papers were too fat and happy?
Yes! We didn't anticipate what was coming. Obviously you don't want too much destruction, you don't want to lose the ability to cover local news aggressively. But there had to be change. It took us too long to recognize that.
