Dead-Tree Blogs

Something Thomas Sowell said in a recently quoted piece came back to me:

Even those who write editorials about how we need Mexicans to do work that Americans will not do would not be willing to write editorials for a fraction of what they are being paid. If Mexican editorial writers were coming across the border illegally and taking their jobs, maybe the issue would become clearer.

And I thought: "Wait a minute. Something like this is happening right now."

The folks undercutting the editorial market aren’t Mexicans for the most part, but new technology (the blog) has made it possible for a large number of people to editorialize, and they are doing so, and doing so for free. In fact, most of the successful ones pay something to have customized, attractive blogs, and I don’t know if the revenues from all those political T-shirt ads actually subsidize the costs of doing the blog. In any event, they’re severely cutting into the market for editorials.

Not convinced?

Well, newspaper circulation has been dwindling for decades as more folks started getting their news from radio and then television. Back in the first half of the 20th century, for example, each city used to would have multiple newspapers of competing ideologies. Not any more. Most cities have only one major daily paper. The market won’t sustain more than that. That’s why so many cities and regions have newspapers with hyphenated names like "Union-Tribune" or "Democrat-Gazette" or "Post-Dispatch." The old rivals merged when the market for papers shrank.

Now broadcast TV news is suffering due to defections to cable and the Internet. Meanwhile, newspaper circulation continues to decline:

Circulation at 814 of the nation’s largest daily newspapers declined 1.9 percent over the six months ended March 31 compared with the same period last year, an industry trade group reported yesterday.

The decline continued a 20-year trend in the newspaper industry as people increasingly turn to other media such as the Internet and 24-hour cable news networks for information [SOURCE].

It may well be a generational thing, too. Those who I know who read newspapers tend to be of the generation that grew up with them when they were stronger than they are now.

Personally, I never read newspapers (except when I’m travelling and a complimentary one is shoved under my door). Frankly, I don’t want to get a newspaper at home. I already have too many books in my house, and I Don’t Need Any More Paper, Thankyou. Having someone throw more paper at my door every day would just clutter the place up.

In fact, I’m getting sick of having dead-tree books around. Given the volume of volumes in my library, I want everything to be space-savingly electronic (either readable or audio both), and I’m starting to become resistant to buying non-electronic books. Unfortunately, the publishers aren’t where I need them to be yet.

So I get all my news online or from cable and talk radio. I know that not everybody does that (or else newspapers would already be out of business entirely in dead tree form), but there are more and more folks who are getting their news from non-paper sources.

And the blogosphere has only intensified that shift.

You can spend hours a day (if you want to) reading commentary on any subject of your choosing. Fresh, new commentary! Churned out daily by the legions of pajamahadeen.

With all this commentary available for free on the Net, why would I want to pick up a newspaper to get my analysis?

Habit.

If I’m in the habit of doing so, if I’m not yet comfortable with the Internet, if I’m already attached to a commentator who’s not available online without an obnoxious registration requirement. In those cases, I might want to pick up a newspaper for commentary.

But I’m not in that habit. And neither are the new batch of kids being raised right now.

So what else might attract me to pick up a newspaper for commentary?

Quality.

Hypothetically, the newspapers could aggregate to themselves all the quality commentators and generate commentary of a markedly higher quality than what’s available in the blogosphere. But that ain’t gonna happen. It would mean chucking out the vast majority of the individuals publishing slop editorials today and recruting the most talented bloggers.

A little bit of that is actually happening (thus, for example the PowerLine guys occasionally write editorials for different papers, thus decreasing proportionately the amount of space devoted to non-blogger editorialists). But a full-scale, overnight housecleaning isn’t in the offing, and even if newspapers paid the best editorialists to stop blogging and write exclusively for them (which also won’t happen) then a new crop of bloggers would make the leap from Large Mammal to Higher Being in the TTLB Ecosystem and take their places as premier, for-free online editorialists.

So I don’t think it’s practically possible for newspapers to outperform the blogosphere in quality or price.

But if you can’t outperform someone in either quality or cost, that makes your survival precarious–as indeed the survival of major daily metropolitan newspapers now is.

Oh, sure, they’ll be around in some vastly shrunken form in the decades to come. And I’m sure that there will still be editorials in them. Editors, like everybody else, want to spout off about their opinions.

They want to have their own, daily dead-tree blogs.

But the market is changing. Dramatically. And fewer and fewer folks will be willing to pay for a daily dead-tree blog when they can get the same quality analysis online for free.

Now everybody can be an editor.

Something like Sowell’s hypothetical scenario is already happening.