Red All Over

RED ALL OVER
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Steven Rattner]
[Commentary] Newspapers face more complex, deeper and considerably more intractable challenges than these theories suggest. The time that Americans spend reading newspapers has been dropping steadily (now down to 15 hours a month), with scant evidence that quality Internet time is taking its place. In September, the average visitor to newspaper Web sites spent only 41.5 minutes per month on those sites, up 10% from the previous year but not nearly enough to make up the loss. And while the use of newspaper Web sites is growing, the vast preponderance of Americans get their online news through the big portals (AOL, Yahoo, etc.), which means that they are mostly consuming a bland porridge of wire service stories. Most fundamental is whether the public is still interested in news (as opposed to entertainment, gossip or lifestyle info). More than fearing the death of newspapers -- they will struggle on -- we ought to fear what changing reading and viewing habits are forcing newspapers to think of as news. We shouldn't fault the papers for this, however, any more than we should fault the evening news for going soft or the newsweeklies for their endless lifestyle covers or CNN for its hyperventilating over every weather blip. They're merely providing what their customers are demanding. We can't expect the objectives of enterprises that were organized around a for-profit interest to necessarily intersect with the societal value of quality journalism. So perhaps it's time to think about new models for the news business. Not-for-profit status might be one possibility. Instead of having billionaire moguls as proprietors, we could try to turn them into philanthropists who found nonprofit organizations to buy and operate their local papers.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117150996245409526.html?mod=todays_us_op...
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