My last Sunday Star Tribune newspaper landed on my doorstep early yesterday morning; by the time I’d ventured out to collect it, I’d already read the New York Times headlines, the Washington Post book pages, and my favorite funnies (including Calvin & Hobbes and Bloom County, blessedly rebroadcast in this digital age). I’ve let my newspaper subscription lapse because most weeks I find myself hauling unread paper to the recycling bin, and tend to use the newspaper more as a firebuilding tool on camping trips than as a news source.
It will be a little odd not to have the newspaper around, because I’ve been an avid newspaper reader for about thirty years. I first started reading a newspaper regularly in 5th grade; we were living in West Germany, and had the Stars & Stripes (the military’s paper–surprisingly good and independent) delivered, along with a week-old Lewiston Sun-Journal, my father’s hometown paper. Once I was out on my own in college, subscribing to the local newspaper was one of the things that fell into the category of getting the electricity and telephone turned on when setting up a home. In addition to my subscription, I also made a habit on the weekends of venturing out for a regional or national paper, usually the New York Times or the Chicago Tribune.
Not take the newspaper? Unthinkable!
Two big changes have converged, though, to make taking the paper less important to me. The first is parenthood: I don’t have the time to sit down with a cup of coffee and the newspaper now that I’m also making breakfasts, distributing laundry, encouraging kids to get their coats and shoes, and making sure everyone gets out the door to school, swimming lessons, or Cub Scouts. The daily paper subscription was the first casualty to the compression of time; I’ve finally admitted that the weekend paper was a casualty, too, a long time ago.
The other big change is the Internet, which has made global news sources abundantly and ubiquitously available. Using Google Reader and Feedly (technical details here), I can assemble my own newspaper with headlines from not only the Star Tribune but also the New York Times, Manchester Guardian, Toronto Globe and Mail, and Lebanon Star. I can beef up my comics page with classics like Bloom County, new favorites like Cul de Sac, and web-only strips like xkcd, and leave Family Circus and Garfield out. I don’t read the sports pages, so I don’t need a sports section: I’ve got a section in my paper for bicycle commuting, though, and a great science page. My books pages draw from not only the New York Times, Washington Post, and Christian Science Monitor review pages, but from a wide range of book bloggers, writers, and poets. And since all of this content is stored “in the cloud,” I can read the funnies on my netbook while I’m making my coffee in the kitchen, read the headlines upstairs while checking my e-mail and bank balances, and even peruse the latest in books and poetry during the five-minute inter-pomodoro breaks at work. In the evening I catch up on the news from around the world and the neighborhood, read a little science and sociology, and exercise my righteous indignation on my opinion pages, which draw widely from a range that includes Andrew Sullivan and the Socialist Worker. I probably consume more news now, albeit in smaller chunks, than when I used to head back to my grad school apartment with an armload of papers and the Village Voice.
Newspaper home delivery, like so many other things we take for granted (highways, shopping malls, parking lots), is a product of post-war suburbanization, and its historical moment is probably coming to a close. Before the middle class fled the cities for the suburbs, newspapers were bought at the corner store, or the newspaper stand, or from a newsboy. Home delivery was the newspapers’ solution to maintaining readership in the less dense suburbs; that it coincided with a bicycle-riding baby boom of pre-teen surplus labor gave rise to the paperboy, one of the icons of mid-century Middle America. Paperboys have long since been replaced by adults in cars or vans, covering much larger routes than would have been possible for a kid on a bike.
Home delivery will likely become a premium service in coming years; subscriptions are falling, and it no longer makes sense to subsidize delivery (the logistical infrastructure of distributing newspapers is enormous and complex, and unlikely to survive the falling fortunes of many local and regional papers). I’m at the tail end of the home delivery demographic; the “digital natives” coming of age now have had their online news sources set up much longer than I have, and won’t see physical home delivery of one newspaper as much of a service when they already have virtual home delivery of hundreds.
The fly in the ointment of this brave new world is, of course, the free rider problem. Good journalism is expensive; advertising is a less and less reliable source of revenue (indeed, I see almost no ads at all when I look at my news through Feedly); as an online “subscriber,” I’m not shouldering my financial share of the burden. And I do feel a little guilty about that.
Newspapers need (as the jingle at On the Media goes) a “present and future business model for monetizing the newspaper industry.” Advertising isn’t working; subscriptions are dropping off; and news room jobs are being slashed, which only threatens to make newspapers even less valuable to their readers.
I’m a member of my local public radio and public television services: I get a lot of value from the public broadcast programming, and I’m glad to pay my share. If other news sources that I use had a similar model, I’d be happy to contribute.
Of course, public broadcasting can’t rely entirely on the good will of its users; there are also public funds and foundation grants involved in paying for their services. Surely other news sources, if operated as non-profits, could attract similar foundation support. The challenge would be converting papers to non-profit (rather than money-losing) operations after a decade of debt and unrealistic profit expectations fueled by speculative investors.
If my Internet subscription included a news fee (much like telephone service has those various “access fee” additions), and that fee were distributed either directly to the sources to which I subscribe, or to a foundation that would distribute the money to news gathering services, I’d be perfectly happy. I’d even be happy to participate in something like Kachingle proposes, letting me split a monthly subscription fee amongst the services I find most valuable. Some months might see more of my money going to the Star Tribune, other months to Bookslut, depending on who provides me with the information I use and enjoy most.
But putting all of my media money into one (relatively leaky) bucket? That no longer makes sense.
