Chronicling the demise of old media

NET RESULTS:The future of newspapers is the topic du jour for the media itself, writes KARLIN LILLINGTON

' THE CHRONICLEmay close!"

My mother’s voice, coming across the phone line from the San Francisco Bay Area, was full of disbelief.

I shared it. Though the San Francisco Chroniclenever had quite the same journalistic profile as other large city newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times or New York Times, and was the butt of a joke in the Watergate saga, All the President's Men (Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee threatens reporters Woodward and Bernstein with a career on the Chronicle if they screw up on their facts), the "Voice of the West" was still a venerable paper.

More importantly, it was our venerable paper, always there at the breakfast table. My parents bought at least two papers (they still do), and the star was always the Chronicle. If they went on holiday, they had to find somewhere that supplied the Chronicle – known in our house as “the Chron”, though a friend called it “the Comical” – and they’d happily pay a wince-inducing premium for it.

The Chron shaped my childhood through to adulthood, mainly thanks to its stellar, prize- winning columnists – sometimes it seemed almost nothing but columnists. These included Art Hoppe, Stanton Delaplane (credited with bringing Irish coffee to the US in 1952 after a visit to Shannon airport – within two years, Irish whiskey imports to the US jumped 40 per cent) and, of course, Herb Caen, Mr San Francisco. Some of my earliest breakfast memories are of my father reading out amusing snippets from Caen’s daily column to my mother.

Later, as a teenager, I devoured Armistead Maupin’s lively daily instalment of semi- fictional life in his Tales of the City column, later to become a series of books and a television programme. It was a hilarious eye-opener and educational experience for a relatively naive teen.

When I was a young adult working abroad in London, my father devotedly clipped out Caen’s best columns and sent them to me.

But now, thanks to the incessant challenge and churn of the internet, this newspaper, which is more than 140 years old and in its infancy employed Mark Twain as a drama critic, may disappear.

The Chron, of course, is not alone in its tribulations – most of the major US city dailies are in crisis. The Seattle paper is gone, and the Chicago Tribune, LA Times and New York Timesare all in trouble.

Unsurprisingly, the future of newspapers is the topic du jour for the media itself, which is in the odd position of fearing that it may be on its own deathwatch while trying to analyse the shifts in media consumption and look towards its own, hoped for, future.

The Guardian, long at the forefront of experimental new media, is particularly good at gazing upon its own sector's car crash. This week, it featured a lead media story on the rise and rise of left-wing US internet news and commentary site the Huffington Post (which has a third of the New York Times' internet audience already, and is getting venture capital injections even as the Times struggles to meet its debts).

Bloggers are also fascinated with old media’s pain. I particularly liked a recent post and essay by well-known technology and culture commentator Clay Shirky in the US (http://tinyurl.com/bpxulr).

Shirky’s thesis is, I think, spot on: newspapers keep waiting for a net-encompassing business model to emerge based on old, dying offline models, while ignoring fundamental media and cultural shifts that mean this is never going to happen.

Other commentators have posited that citizens and social media tools like blogs, Twitter and whatever comes next will fill the gap for investigative reporting, commentary, and news coverage.

Personally, I think perhaps we are too easily constrained by short-term views of what happens next, as opposed to what happens in the long term, and are understandably focused on our part of the world and people with work- and home-based internet access, forgetting that much of the world doesn’t have these tools for online access and won’t have them anytime soon.

I’d be inclined to think that the web-based, free-content, poor advertising revenue model is as much part of the short- to medium-term convulsions as the decline of print media in the western world. No format or business model is written in stone.

I also don’t think the market will want to be catered for solely by citizen journalists using social media formats, though I do believe this will be a major source of news and, especially, commentary (but it’s worth noting that most stories and investigations initiated by citizens only become stories because the mainstream media highlights and pursues them).

In addition, we have a habit of thinking nothing has ever happened before, whereas a bit of historical reading shows that business models for media have been wide and varied. Indeed, the early incarnation of the Chronicle for which Twain worked was a free paper, supported by advertising revenue and established to challenge the papers of the time – not too different from internet upstarts such as the Huffington Post.

Ultimately, Shirky is confident that, while media formats may change, journalism itself will survive. But I expect much pain to be inflicted on the mainstream media while existing formats buckle and collapse.

klillington@irishtimes.com

Blog and podcasts: www.techno-culture.com