Residents Imagine a Post-Paper Seattle SEATTLE, WA (KPLU) -

(Note - This is part 3 of the series, "A No Newspaper Town?")


"Not everyone is online you know, so I don't know what Seattle is going to be like without a newspaper. We've never not had one."

"Journalism is essential, especially in a city like this - a big city that has a lot of different opinions and a lot of different people's ideas."

"I like touching and reading and actually physically reading news, not so much on a computer."

These are some of the reactions Seattleites are having as they watch their oldest newspaper - the Seattle Post-Intelligencer -- face its imminent demise. And with the city's other daily paper, The Seattle Times, grappling with its own financial troubles, it's possible that Seattle could soon become a city with no newspaper at all. Joe Campo says that's reason to be upset.

"How do you know what's occurring in your community that's not a fire or a murder, or whatever is going to make it onto TV news?" he wonders. "I have to admit, though, that I read a number of newspapers, all online."

But there's a problem with those online news sources: They get most of their material from old-fashioned newspaper newsrooms, staffed by hundreds of reporters and editors. What will happen if there are far fewer reporters keeping an eye on local affairs?

"We're very dependent, quite honestly, on the newspapers," says Nick Licata, a Seattle City Councilman and longtime community activist. "For instance, when I get a call at 7 o'clock in the morning to comment on some public action that one of our committees has been engaged in, it's not because that TV or radio reporter was in the audience. Most of the time it's because they saw it in the newspaper, and they're doing a follow-up story."

Licata says he's worried that the electronic media -- including websites -- will be unable to fill the vacuum if daily papers disappear.

"I think you're dumbing down the democracy," he says.

He's hoping someone in Seattle will step forward and help sustain journalism in the city.

"Good reporting takes time," Licata says. "How does one support oneself doing that kind of work? They need an entity that is going to pay them for their labor. This is a labor intensive occupation."

According to most analysts, the main problem with newspapers is money. And it's not simply that more people are reading their news online. Consider this: If you want to buy something, or find out what's for sale, where would you look today? Would you first pick up a paper and flip through the advertisements, or would you search online?

These questions were front and center at a public forum last month, called "Journalism on the Brink," where Hanson Hosein, director of the University of Washington's masters program in digital media, described how the whole business model of journalism is collapsing.

"We've never paid for the true cost of journalism," he said at the forum. "The closest thing we ever came to it was paying for a subscription to a newspaper. But, as we know, for all of the 20th century, that has been subsidized by advertising."

Advertisers need a way to get their products in front of customers, so the price readers pay for a newspaper covers a tiny portion of what it really costs to make. Now, advertisers are following their shoppers online. But, because online ads are spread across hundreds of different websites, newspapers would have to lay-off up to 90% of their reporters just to break even online.

Even within newspapers, some sections subsidize others. It's all bundled together -- sports, entertainment, weather, business, local news. At The Seattle Times' Web site, it's still together, but readers don't necessarily take the whole bundle. SeattleTimes.com Director of Content Cory Haik says the Web allows her to know exactly what's making money and what's not - and it's not stories about local policy and politics.

"Entertainment: tons of money," she says. "People click on those stories, those display ads are making money. Not so much necessarily for, say, something like the meat and potatoes like local news. People aren't necessarily that interested."

So how do you subsidize meat and potatoes journalism on the internet -- which operates like an a la carte menu? The bundling and the cross-subsidies are all disrupted. Despite complaints about newspaper publishers and their monopoly, they did pay the salaries of reporters and editors who researched stories, interviewed opposing voices, checked documents and attended meetings.

"You do have to pay journalists, at some point," says John Cook, a former business reporter at the P-I who left to start a technology news Web site, called TechFlash. "You do need to make money doing it, right? When I was thinking about going out completely on my own as an entrepreneur and doing this all on my own, I was afraid of getting sued and buckling under those pressures."

Cook found a patron, by becoming a unit of the Puget Sound Business Journal. Even though he receives a salary, he's also part of the new world of blog-style journalism. He shares his work in progress, maybe several times a day. Readers see a story unfold - and they participate by adding their comments.

"I've done some of the more hard-hitting, journalistic stories of my career in the last three or four months," he says. "I've covered stock frauds I've covered a company in Bellevue that was basically ripping off youth sports leagues. And the great thing about the social media element of it is I would tell a piece of it, and then comments would just flood in -- 'Hey John, you're missing this part.' -- and then you follow that."

This is a big revolution. In the world of blog-style writing, reporters don't always have an editor scrutinize their work. Instead, they may count on their audience sending corrections, so they can adjust as they go. Mistakes are fixed in public.

A number of Web sites use the blog model. Some call themselves "hyper-local" news - focusing on areas such as West Seattle, Ballard, or central Tacoma. And people such as Lance Bennett, a political science professor at the University of Washington, are very excited about this emerging new media.

"I don't think we want to figure out how to reinvent a dying industry," says Bennett, who studies how the internet, cell phones and other technology are affecting social life and politics. "There is kind of a democratizing trend going on with new media technologies that I think we need to pay special attention to, and figure out how to make journalism and those social technologies come together in a new way."

And whatever that looks like, Bennett says, it needs to be interactive. He says young Americans tend to ignore media that's not interactive, a revolutionary cultural shift in which people pay attention and engage as long as they're able to contribute.

"I think that if we have a different model that actually invites people to help shape the agenda, we might be pleasantly surprised at how interested citizens are in higher quality news about more important issues," Bennett says.

Experiments abound, along with ideas for how to pay for news. Sites could charge per news story, like paying per song on i-Tunes. Or, a new device like Amazon's Kindle book-reader could become the basis for a modern subscription model. Maybe old newspapers could team up with community volunteers who care enough to write about their neighborhoods or causes. And perhaps, some say, newspapers could make it as community non-profits, following the model of NPR.

All of these ideas are in some stage of testing, somewhere. If the daily newspapers are like dinosaurs going extinct, these experiments might be the tiny mammals waiting in the underbrush for a chance to evolve into the new dominant media creatures.

Extra Links:
Hanson Hosein's HRH Media
John Cook's Tech Flash
West Seattle Blog
MyBallard
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