Can newspapers survive?

By Michael Gawenda
There is incessant chatter about the need for a new model for newspapers in the digital age, which might be true, but in the meantime, profitable newspapers are being butchered. Talk of a new model is nothing but empty words.
The editorial cuts announced by Fairfax, publisher of the Herald, in response to a fall in advertising revenue, were chilling. The economic slowdown is the immediate cause, but this was coming for at least a decade. It is a failure of imagination and commitment, a result of a lack of experience and knowledge and love of newspapers. I am not opposed to cuts in editorial staff as a matter of principle. Not every job has to be preserved and protected. I am not saying the Herald and The Age cannot be great newspapers with fewer journalists. They can. And they have to change.
But for real change, courage is needed, as are vision and risk-taking and, above all, a commitment to newspapers and journalism that, frankly, I do not see at the moment.
Young people embarking on a career in journalism should not despair. Things change, often in unexpected and unforeseeable ways. Newspapers can do some things no other medium can match - not television, not radio, not the internet.
One of the great mistakes newspapers have made in recent years is trying to address their weaknesses rather than build on their strengths. So we have shorter stories, bigger headlines, more graphics, more bells and whistles, more tricked-up, overblown pages, more pages meant to look visually rich but which, in the main, look desperate and garish.
This attempt to ape the internet in print is being driven by middle-aged people who, in truth, have no real feel for the net and therefore no real understanding of its strengths and weaknesses. The next generation of journalists, who have grown up in the digital age, are much more likely to understand what newspapers can offer that digitally delivered journalism cannot.
Only newspapers can build a community of readers. What builds that community? Well, for a start, a shared sense of what the newspaper is about, what it considers important, interesting, entertaining and thought-provoking. A shared sense of the city, the country, even the world. That's about telling stories - stories from our courts and police force and local councils and businesses and governments and hospitals. No web news site will ever tell such stories.
Is this investigative journalism? Of course it is. How many newspaper articles do you consider compelling and revelatory, articles that only a reporter, going out there and doing the reporting work, could have brought you? Newspapers need to be in the business of news, but they need to report news that only a newspaper can do well.
The rest, reports of news conferences, PR-driven events, announcements - all of that can go online. Newspapers need to get smaller, clearer in their focus.
Most of the lifestyle sections should migrate to online. That doesn't mean newspapers should stop writing about food, for instance, but think, when was the last time you read a truly well-reported story about food? The reviews and the listings - and entertainment and television guides - are much better done online.
Unlike some people, I believe the future for newspapers is not in commentary and analysis. The internet is awash with commentary. You can read the columnists on every major - and minor - paper in Australia and around the world on the net, and a number of sites aggregate this stuff.
Newspapers should not abandon commentary and analysis, but it should really be just another form of reporting - tell me something I have not thought about. That can be done only by people who know more about a given subject than I know. Too many columnists actually know less than their readers.
Newspapers need to build on their strengths: Forget big headlines and huge and often meaningless graphics. Instead, arresting photography, great illustrations and wonderful editorial cartoons. And stories, well-written and compelling stories, well-edited and with smart and entertaining headlines, if possible, without lousy puns.
Will this sort of newspaper, half the size of most of the papers we produce today, succeed?
Can newspapers have smaller circulations and fewer readers, a premium cover price, no lifestyle sections, no special circulation deals - which basically involve giving the paper away - and be profitable? I think so.
What size staff is required to produce such a newspaper? I suspect a smaller staff than those producing today's papers. I am sure the newspaper and online sites of the newspaper need to be brought together because without that sort of integration, neither will succeed.
Do newspapers have a future? And how long is that future? Well, I ask you to imagine Melbourne without The Age and the Herald Sun or Sydney without the Herald and The Daily Telegraph. Imagine Australia without The Australian.
If you can imagine such a future, in my view, that's in part because of our failure to produce newspapers that attract the sort of fierce and lifelong loyalty they once attracted.
Michael Gawenda is a former editor-in-chief of The Age. This is an extract from his A.N. Smith Lecture in Journalism to be delivered tonight in Melbourne.