TEMPLE: Reading future of newspapers

Published August 18, 2007 at midnight

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I'm often asked what the future looks like for newspapers.

A reasonable question to a guy who spends his days trying to figure out how to keep you connected to one in particular, the Rocky Mountain News, but also works with more than a dozen others in an advisory capacity.

I wish I could tell you for certain. But that's not easy when my nose is pressed to the glass as a witness to current events. The visionaries of our era - whether Ted Turner when he launched CNN or Jimmy Wales when he founded Wikipedia - seem to come from outside and shake things up. Then the rest of us quickly came to think that what they did was as obvious as the fact that night follows day. If only.

Our industry - that's what some people call it - tends to fall into group think about as quickly as our papers come off our printing presses. So now in the U.S. you hear that "local" is the strength of newspapers and that "hyper-local" might even be better. In the U.K., you hear that the future is "viewspapers," a term to describe publications that don't report the news so much as tell you what to think about it. And, of course, everywhere "the Web" is the ultimate answer.

I took great pleasure this week when Rob Reuteman, our business editor, told a group that he's now "platform agnostic." That's another hot term in the industry, signifying what I think is a positive trend, where journalists stop thinking of themselves as "newspaper" people and instead think of themselves as providers of news however, wherever and whenever consumers want to receive it.

Newspapers are going through a period of wrenching change. Even the Newspaper Association of America admits it. But it also hopes that in five to seven years the dust will have settled and the local media franchise of the future will have emerged. It asked a number of industry figures to provide a perspective on what that future franchise might look like.

So here goes.

Most of us will have an avatar - a computer-generated personality - greet us in the morning on our portable, personal screen. They'll be as loved as Oprah. They'll make us feel good as they guide us through the day. Your avatar will know you by your actions. It will anticipate your interests in a way that makes NetFlix's movie recommendations seem as quaint as a butter churn. You will live in a media soup. And whether the ingredients come from Jerusalem or Jasmine Street won't matter. The distinction between mediums will dissolve.

You get the picture. It could be sweet. That's why I think people got so worked up over the iPhone. It signified the promise of something to come.

Wait a second, you say. What about newspapers?

Yes. They'll still be around, ink on paper. There will be even more of them. Most will be physically smaller and have fewer readers than they do today. A few will have even more readers.

In other words, we'll have a few blockbusters or bestsellers. But most will be more specialized. Commodity information - the stuff you can find anywhere, such as stock listings or the complete list of matches in a tennis tournament - will no longer find its way into print.

Instead of producing one paper for everybody, a newsroom might produce 10 newspapers for 10 different audience types, or maybe more. We'll be slicing and dicing to deliver mass-customized newspapers. You can see signs of what I'm talking about in the way the newspaper company Reforma in Mexico produces different products for different audiences.

That's actually going to require next-generation journalists to be more agile and multidimensional. There will be fewer journalists in any single newsroom, but there will be more of them overall.

Today's rules that prevent newspapers from owning television stations and other local media in the same market will be eroded by technological advances. The local media franchise will deliver content the way our business editor now feels comfortable doing. Some of the papers it produces will be free. Others will be more expensive.

New players will get into the business not tied to the traditions of the past. And they'll have a ball. They'll make less money than owners did in the so-called good old days. But they'll do just fine.

As will journalists and the communities they serve, who'll wonder what all the fuss today was about. By that time, we'll all have gotten used to the fact that there is no end to the transformation of the media world.

John Temple can be reached at editor@RockyMountainNews.com or by mail at 101 W. Colfax, Suite 500, Denver, CO 80202.

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