The New York Times Sunday Magazine 7/9/2000

WORD & IMAGE BY MAX FRANKEL

The Nirvana News

A great new medium if you will pay the price.


This being my last word in this space, I dare to imagine what will become of the news business. What will the newspaper of the future look like? Does it even have a future?

The answer, with apologies to the White House, is that it all depends on what your meaning of newspaper is. And of news. And of paper.


If you think a newspaper must always involve an imprint of inks on costly pulp that is processed from Canadian trees, trucked into urban factories and trucked out again to ever more widely dispersed readers, then its prospects are dim indeed. There is no feature of that paper product that will not soon be replicated and improved by digital technologies.

A Daily Digital can be delivered to you faster, cheaper and in much more versatile and desirable forms than any Truck Times. You could download it anywhere and read it on a portable tablet the size of a magazine. Or you could print out as much as you like on electronic sheets that feel like paper but can be endlessly reused in your home computer. Nothing magical about these forms; the technology is at hand.

Indeed, there is little that a paper journal does for you that a Web journal could not do better. A good old newspaper brings you both headlines and articles that are relevant to your life and citizenship, news that is instructive or interesting or both, plus diversions, opinions and advertisements that you either seek out or discover by browsing. The paper is portable, easily scannable and, with effort, preservable. Moreover, it forms a community of readers whose shared experience of it enhances their interests and conversations.

A Daily Digital could do all that -- faster and cheaper. It would also have infinite cyberspace for readers who want elaboration and illustration of any news item, including vivid videos and recordings. It would facilitate both rapid searching and extensive research and allow easy filing and retrieval of all articles. And it would let readers range far beyond the prix fixe menu of any single group of editorial chefs. News on the Web can be ordered à la carte, from a thousand kitchens.

Without much effort, you can already consume a news stew that takes the foreign news from The Times, politics from The Washington Post, sports from USA Today, business from The Wall Street Journal and the opinions of every columnist in America. You can program this Daily Composite so that the desired features are packaged with your local weather report, TV and movie schedules and Help Wanted ads. Or you can have the mix prepared by Web editors who keep a record of your interests, down to the stocks you own and the baseball teams you follow. And as you cruise the Web, you will be pursued by electronic spies that then surmise your interests and those of like-minded people to tempt you with a customized package of articles and advertising.

As for community, the Daily Digital will instantly propel you into as many circles as you wish, with instant e-mail and chat rooms to debate public issues or share shopping experiences, recipes and gardening tips.

So when will you get The Nirvana News? Alas, not until the Web worshipers quit their rhapsodizing about "free" digital news and figure out a way to pay for its production. The Web has so far supplanted only the newspaper's trucks. It has not produced very good reporter robots or electronic editors. Nor has it figured out how to pay the costly humans needed to gather, interpret, write and package information in the coming world.

News that analyzes events and investigates all aspects of life is an expensive, handmade commodity. For the moment, the Web is getting it free of charge from the old ink media that are searching for ways to adapt to the new technology. Indeed, the Web is temporarily enriching newspapers with the self-promotions of dot-com companies. But electronic commerce will inevitably siphon off much of the advertising that has been supporting news gatherers without reinvesting that revenue in sophisticated journalism.

Unfortunately, the economics of newspapering are not easily replicated on the Web. Newspapers draw three-fourths of their income from advertising and most derive about half of that from classified ads -- the very ads for real estate, jobs and cars that will be the first to depart for the Internet and flourish there without being married to news content. General advertising will also migrate to Web sites that resemble shopping catalogs or television entertainments, sites that lack any journalistic purpose.

An enterprising electronic newspaper, therefore, will have to depend much more heavily than its printed forebears on revenue from readers. It may try to charge admission, perhaps pennies per page on a "pay as you read" basis if it can compete with the free headline services that will proliferate on the Web. The Daily Digital will surely seek income by collecting fees for reprints from its archives or for searches of reference works and other databases. Popular news sites will not only address groups of readers with "personalized" advertising but also seek to earn commissions for turning readers into customers for other merchants.

It is far from certain, however, that these forms of income will support the costs of producing a sophisticated news report. Television provides a scary example of what can happen to news gathering when a technological shift diverts the revenues of print. Although billions of advertising dollars migrated to TV from newspapers and magazines, only a fraction -- indeed, a still declining fraction -- of that money has been devoted to the pursuit and analysis of important news. On local TV, a mere handful of reporters and producers pretend to cover events that newspapers traditionally covered with hundreds. And the number of network correspondents covering national and foreign affairs has dwindled to a precious few.

There is no doubt that the Web is a much more efficient distributor of information than the two-ton truck. Newspapers must adapt to digital technologies or die. The foreseeable techniques of presenting news are dazzling, but they do not yet point to a reliable stream of income to pay for the harvesting of news. The oft-heard promise of "free news" is an oxymoron. Americans will get the journalism they pay for.

Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company