Photo by mushon

I have a real soft spot for newspapers.

Before I set off on my own as a web designer, I worked at a newspaper in Memphis as a web designer for two years. My college degree is in Media Design, which is an amalgamation of a journalism degree and a graphic design degree. I cut my teeth laying out print pages for many, many different publications. So when I hear news that newspapers are dying, it makes me sad.

Ted Rall recently wrote a column explaining what he would do to fix newspaper's woes. In a nutshell, Rall sees the problem as people leaving the printed paper because the same information can be found online for free. He suggests that newspapers should stop publishing online immediately and start copyrighting every article they write in order to increase the scarcity of the news, which would drive people back into the arms of the printed paper.

The basic principles of Rall's solution are sound: the concepts of supply and demand have been the base of economics ever since we started calling it economics. The problem is that Rall wants to turn back the clock to the early 90s and forget this whole internet thing ever happened.

If newspapers ever took Rall's suggestions seriously, they'd put themselves in a very similar position as the RIAA. People would still get their news for free, either by researching it themselves, or more likely by one or two people buying a copy of the newspaper and posting it online and selling ads around the content. There aren't enough lawyers in the country to stop everybody who would violate the news copyright to prevent the dissemination of news.

More to the point, by removing themselves from the conversation, newspapers would make themselves even more irrelevant than they already are. The whole point of a newspaper is to inform its readers on what's important in the world. By shutting itself off, a newspaper is very likely to suffocate.

That's not to say that newspapers need to keep chugging along like there's nothing wrong. The world around them has changed, and they need to change with it or face turning into a relic of the past. Here's a few suggestions to get started.

• Stop trying to rely on the printed product as your main source of income: Print won't be dead until computers and internet connections become as ubiquitous as newsprint. However, that doesn't mean that you can lean on subscription services and print ad dollars to provide for your every need.
• Find alternate sources of income that don't involve the news: Not everyone at a newspaper is a journalist. Just about every modern newspaper has a staff of ad agents, printers, designers and web staff that don't actually write stories, but perform other functions necessary to keep the paper going. These people should be tapped and expanded upon to work on projects unrelated to the newspaper. Every newspaper should also be a printing press because they already have the equipment. Every newspaper should also act as an advertising firm for outside clients because they already have the ad reps and designers to do so. Newspapers should create web sites not only for themselves, but for hire because, again, they already have the manpower to do so.

  The journalists should essentially be patrons of the larger organization. They do their work best when they're not swayed by money concerns from ads and such, so they should be shielded from the operations of other departments as much as possible.

• Invest in alternate mediums to convey your news, especially your web site.
• Rely less on wire services: This is a point that Rall and I actually agree upon. Wire services end up being a crutch for newspapers to flesh out their content when they can't cover a story themselves. Newspapers need to focus more on creating unique content for their readership, not republishing articles that can be found anywhere else. That's not to say that they shouldn't use it entirely, but the paper needs to use it's own voice whenever possible.

Further reading:

NEWS DOES NOT WANT TO BE FREE - Ted Rall's original article
Information Wants to Be Free (or Does It?) - Old, but a good discussion