The problem with the newspaper is the paper part

Look, I work at a newspaper, and I love it. I got into journalism for the drinking and the swearing, and I haven’t yet been disappointed. If I had been a smoker? Disappointed. But I don’t smoke. So, not only is two out of three not bad, it’s pretty much batting 1.000 for me.

But I sure could have picked a better decade. I won’t even bother linking to any news stories about the decline of the news media, about the dismal prospects for journalists, about the job cuts, and the layoffs, and the buyouts, and the quality that’s going down the pooper. That’s all old hat. Let’s just suffice it to say that The Atlantic says things are so bad, even the venerable New York Times could go bankrupt — this May.

Some people are even calling for what amounts to a bailout of the media industry — using Google’s billions.

That’s looking backwards. What’s really going to be interesting, I think, is going to be looking forwards: the next decade, not the last. Like many news organizations, the one I work for is desperately trying to cut its way to profitability. Seeing advertising revenues decline, they’re slashing costs wherever they can, trying to recapture those magical 20% margins from the 1980s. Guess what? Twenty per cent of $0.00 isn’t profitable. And guess what? If you’re old enough to remember working in the 1980s, your business models are no longer relevant.

So far, my own smaller newspaper has escaped any cuts in the newsroom (although I wouldn’t want to be a pressman right now). I can’t say that about the rest of the industry, however — there’s been 1,200 job cuts in Canadian media in the last three months along.

What’s interesting is that all those laid-off people still need to make a living. And they still have the drive and desire to be journalists — to dig into stories, to investigate them, and to tell them. Individually, they are probably feeling lost and scared. But you don’t get into journalism for the coddling or the big bucks. You do get into it for the glory, for the thrill of the chase, for the teeth-sinking gotcha of nailing a great story. And you know right from the start that long hours, stressful deadlines and evenings and weekends are going to be your shift.

Collectively, these laid-off journalists are a teeming resource that just happens to have nothing to do at the exact same moment that the Internet makes self-publishing easier and better than ever before.

I signed up for this web hosting for $7 a month. Sure, I had to sign a three-year contract, but all told that’s less than $300 (okay, slightly more in Canadian dollars). But that gets me unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth. If I hit the front page of Slashdot, Digg or BoingBoing, I’m pretty sure this website will be able to handle it.

That’s unprecedented. If the freedom of the press is limited to those who own one, heck, you can get ‘em for less than 25¢ a day.

Sure, I know all the caveats and drawbacks. Random bloggers have zero authority, zero backing, zero prominence and zero credibility. But they also have perfect independence. Of course, bloggers also have the independence to sell out, if that’s what they want, whereas “professional” journalists have somewhat of a code of ethics. But ethics are individual, not defined by one’s career.

So think about it: legions of unemployed journliasts, some perhaps with several months of severance, staring at an awful job market in which to flog their skills, and yet handed the opportunity to self-publish anything and everything they’ve ever wanted.

No, a million monkeys typing will not necessarily produce the works of Shakespeare, and a million flailing journalists typing into the night won’t necessarily rival the New York Times, either, but … but what if?

What if Open Source?

The benefit of Open Source is that anyone can add to it — people say that anyone can improve it, but you’re perfectly able to download the code and make it worse if you want. People just won’t adopt your changes.

But Open Source software isn’t the same as democratic design — people don’t have to vote or agree on the changes that can or will be introduced. It’s raucous and rowdy, sure, but there’s an organizing heirarchy that makes sure a product like Firefox or Ubuntu actually gets shipped out the door in a usable form.

That’s what these unemployed journalists need. Digg has tried something like that, so has Wikipedia, with Wikinews. They both suck, to be honest, at replicating journalism.

But somewhere out there, among the unemployed ink-stained wretches, someone has an idea. Perhaps it’s just a spark. But they’ll put finger to keyboard, and something collaborative will launch. It’ll be emailed around journalism job-seeking websites. People will laugh, people will mock, and some people will check it out, intrigued. Some kind of critical mass will be hit. It’ll get written up by “mainstream” newspapers … and then who knows what will happen?

Look, those mainstream newspapers are not stupid. Check out this piece in Slate, which argues pretty pursuasively that newspapers have always tried to be on the cutting edge of delivering news to readers. Unfortunately, that’s not always enough.

To be frank, the newspaper “business” is not about delivering news to readers. It’s all about delivering eyeballs to advertisers. And while there are great and innovative news websites out there, none of them have really succeeded in that all-important “monetization.” Instead, alternative websites have sprung up to deliver eyeballs to advertisters. Craigslist is the obvious one, and it has a gajillion competitors, now — all of them siphoning away the huge cash cow that used to be classified advertising.

The business of newspapers is in the middle of being sundered from the pursuit of journalism.

This is earth-shattering, and we’re in the middle of it, and no one really knows what’s going on — least of all, the three-years-from-retirement management types who just want to put in their time and collect their pensions before things go well and truly tits-up.

That’s why I think the Open Source model offers some conceptual hints of where journalism could go. It will no longer be supported by lazy ad sales reps, earning fat commissions for selling giant ads to car dealers. Those car dealers want more for their (government) money. They — and verybody else — are going to start targeting their ads a lot more finely.

Sure, newspapers (and really, I should include all local media, like radio and TV stations, in this mix) will struggle along in vaguely their current form for probably another generation, taking reduced ad rates from the old hardware store owner who hasn’t yet gone under from Home Depot, and selling bulk-rate subscriptions to senior citizen’s homes.

But that won’t be where the real advertising is. I was taught early on that newspaper readers value the ads — they like finding bargains, they like being informed of the sales, they like the flyers. This offended my journalistic sensibilities, but I got over it.

Advertising is valuable content, and it’s moving online, where it can be by itself, not competing with “stories” and “news.” This transition has been under way for a while, actually — since flyers became more popular than Run-Of-Paper standard ads — but it’s far more effective with sticky advertising content-driven websites.

Journalism is going to have to find its own way, too. And since it won’t be supported by big bad business, maybe it will have a chance to be more daring, more original, less staid. I don’t know exactly how it’s going to work, but I’m eager to find out. I think you’ll see journalists working for “free,” like the anonymous coders who contribute to Firefox. And some of them will be moonlighting from their jobs as copywriters or PR flacks. But some of them will just be doing it for fun.

And some of them will get paid — perhaps under the umbrella of a subscription model, like Consumer Reports, or a philanthropic trust, like the Poynter Institute, or a “crowdsourcing” initiative like Spot.us, where journalists pitch their ideas for investigative stories, and when enough people have pledged enough cash, cumulatively, the story gets green-lit.

I don’t know if there’s a silver bullet out there to save all those thousands of jobs. And I’m saddened that so many people are out of work and struggling. But I’m more than a little exited by the possibilities — so many people looking for something, and so much untapped talent, waiting for that spark of an idea, the “killer ap” that will change everything.

It’s out there. And for $7 a month, heck even this little website could start it. So, ideas? Apply within.