Disruption is the great catch-cry of the modern newspaper industry. It is a byword for the Internet – the technology that hastened the news-cycle, that stole the classifieds and ruined the model on which print journalism had based itself for centuries. Entire TED sessions have been given over to it.
Clayton Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor, has written a small bible on the topic.
But panic is the better word. Panic is the white noise of large media organisations. It is their most constant emotional state. It was panic that caused newspapers to
first ignore the internet as classified advertising moved online and then misjudge it as they scrambled to keep up. And it is panic that has stripped confidence from print journalism before disruption has actually made it unviable.
I make these two points because I think the distinction is the best means of explaining the print newspaper we are in the process of launching. There is no doubt we are
announcing The Saturday Paper – a sister to
The Monthly and
Quarterly Essay – in the leeside of a storm that has battered newsrooms around the world. But we do so because we think this storm has created a panic which forced news organisations to abandon newspapers before they needed to. Panic has caused newspapers to respond to disruption in damaging ways.
There is no question in my mind that newsprint remains the best place to read long-form journalism. And while print survives in niches, long-form journalism is the greatest niche of all – a type of journalism forced out of newsrooms as journalists are sped by the 24-hour news-cycle and try to compete in print with the kind of fast-paced news to which the internet is clearly better disposed.
This is where panic intersects with disruption. I think there is a model under which print journalism can succeed. Indeed, all our projections have this being true. But that model cannot be about competing with the internet – not for classified advertising, not for scope of audience, not for being first. It is a model wherein you conceive a newspaper around its audience and then decide what newsprint does best for that audience. Our answer is news that jams the gears on the internet’s voracious cycle; news that takes time to produce, that accepts the best account is not always the first account, that holds back the flow of information and tells readers what is really important. It is news that is analytical, complex and driven always by narrative. It is a broad niche.
Confidence in niches is uncontroversial. In magazine publishing, they are a given. The successes of
Monocle or
Frankie make this plain. But in newspapers they have not been effectively mined. As the media strategist Philip Phelan
wrote five years ago: “The future of newspapers must be smaller, specialised and personal.” That final qualifier is the important one. Indeed, it defines the other two. Newspapers struggled even before the internet to properly understand their audience – it had always been too broad and then, when it contracted, it was too diverse. Christensen addressed this in his study of disruptive technologies and their effect on disk drives, the fruit fly of the technology industry. He
wrote that “leading firms were held captive by their customers, enabling attacking entrant firms to topple the incumbent industry leaders each time a disruptive technology emerged.” This is the legacy of audience. Confusion over existing readers and a desire for new ones has made the panic in newspapers even worse.
And so we think print is not dead, but it is easier to start a newspaper than to save one. Nothing has effectively replaced the beauty of holding a paper at the weekend, or of reading a long story in one. When it comes to forming habits, nothing competes with the predictability of a print cycle and the physical act of turning pages. Even in their weakened state, stories in newspapers have greater impact than stories that appear only online.
There are few more effective ways to be called crazy than to start a newspaper in 2013. But we are launching The Saturday Paper because we think the only way to save newspapers is to start them again – to respond to panic with a business model that uses niches to allow calm; to repair the damage done to news journalism by speed; to work with difficult, important stories and write for new audiences.
We believe the best way to help serious journalism is to salvage the platform that best carries it. That is why we believe in print.
