Texas Center For Community Journalism

TED Talks just posted a video of Clay Shirky speaking to participants at a conference at the State Department where he discusses how social media are changing how we communicate. “Where the phone gave us the one-to-one pattern, and television, magazines, radio and books gave us the one-to-many pattern, the Internet gives us the many-to-many pattern,” he says. Shirky uses global news events, such as the earthquakes in China and President Obama’s campaign, to illustrate how citizens are becoming involved in citizen journalism. His observations have some interesting implications, even for community newspapers, as these social media technologies continue to spread.

Most newspaper trade magazines and industry Websites are full of reasons that printed newspapers must and should survive. They admit that changes are on the horizon, but they assert that new technologies will only supplement the newspaper, not replace it.

And so frequently, we in the newspaper business ignore the elephant in the room: the possibility that the newspaper we know and love — the ink-on-newsprint product — may not survive. And in the next room, there’s an even bigger elephant: the possibility that the newspaper’s extinction may not be something our children or grandchildren will see, but that it may come in our lifetime … and maybe even in the next decade.

So let me put my cards on the table up front: I love newspapers. I read them every day. I do get news online, but sitting down with a newspaper and a cup of coffee in the morning is a cherished part of my day. And I head up an organization designed to support newspaper journalism, while at the same time encouraging those papers to develop effective online editions.

But I think all of us in newspaper journalism need to listen, and pay close attention to, those voices who claim that the medium we love so much — and earn our living from — may be destined for extinction.

Why must we listen to these prophets of doom? Because they may be right. Why should you get a colonoscopy if you may find out that you have cancer? Because while cancer screenings like this do tell some people that it’s already too late, far more are able to make changes that result in a long life.

The changes may not be those you want to make. They may involve diet and exercise, or even worse, radiation and chemotherapy or surgery. But they are infinitely preferable to the alternative.

The mission of the Texas Center for Community Journalism in these troubling times for newspapers is twofold:

• to look at all the ways we can improve the printed product by more effective writing and editing and photography and design and management and circulation strategies, but also
• to look at the new medium of the Internet to find ways that we can deliver the news in this new medium.

You see, it’s not journalism that’s in trouble. It’s newspapers. What’s the real function of a newspaper? It’s not to put ink on paper; it’s to deliver news and information and images and entertainment to a community, to provide a forum for the community to talk with itself and to examine ideas. For centuries, the most effective way to do that was on the printed page. But times change, and we must face the possibility that newsprint may not survive as a delivery system for community journalism.

Community newspapers are actually the only bright spot in the newspaper industry right now. Community newspapers, especially if you discount problems brought on by our faltering economy, are actually quite healthy. But we know that national trends may reach us slower than they do the big cities, but they reach us nonetheless.

And all the statistics available to us — along with what you observe every day in your own experience – indicate that our readership is aging and that young people are not committed newspaper readers. As TCCJ associate director Jerry Grotta told a community newspaper publisher 30 year ago: Watch the obits every day and reduce your press run by the number of obits you run — because you are not replacing those readers with younger ones.

You see young people with iPods and iPhones and you hear them talking about the time they spend on Facebook or Twittering. We’ve always believed — or is it just hoped — that as they got older and got married and settled down, that they would become newspaper readers. The statistics available on readership, though, show that this isn’t what’s happening.

The most-talked-about piece right now predicting the death of the newspaper was written a couple of months ago by blogger/professor Clay Shirky. Let me urge you to read it; it’s unsettling, but it deserves consideration. A long time ago, philosopher John Stuart Mill said that we should read things that contradict what we believe — because if we’re really right, we will only come away strengthened in our beliefs by reading the other side. Or maybe that opinion, though wrong, contains just one nugget of truth we need to consider. Or just maybe that opinion is right, and we need to consider it honestly.

What we do every day in community journalism is essential for our communities. People need the news and information we bring to make informed decisions. But the essential element here is not ink and paper, but news and information. One hundred years ago, people traveled on horseback and in buggies. Horses and carriages were media to fulfill the important function of transportation. Then cars came along. They did not do away with travel — they just moved it to a different medium and extended it and speeded it up. Now horses are for recreation, not work, and carriages are museum pieces. The work they performed, though, is more important than ever — just performed by the “new” medium of automobiles.

Will newspapers go the way of the horse and buggy? Clay Shirky and many others say yes. Still other observers disagree — they say that newspapers will redefine themselves, much like radio did when TV came along, and keep on going.

Whatever you believe, though, this is not the time to stick our heads in the sand and refuse to think about what could well be the most important issue newspapers have ever encountered: the possibility of their own extinction.

So read Shirky’s article, “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable”, and then respond in the comments. Let us know what you think. And especially let us know what you think the response of Texas community newspapers should be.