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My favorite newspaper blogger, Newsosaur, writes about the ever accelerating fall of newspapers -

 The devastating double-digit drop in daily newspaper circulation in the last six months leaves little doubt that the classic mass media model will not work for newspapers – or perhaps any other medium, either.

Editor and Publisher has the full numbers that show an impressive decline in just the last 3 months -

1. USA Today circulation fell 17% making WSJ the #1 newspaper in the country. 
2. NY Times fell 7%. 
3. LA Times fell 11%.
4. San Francisco Chronicle is the poster child of the decline with a 25% drop.

Here’s a graphic history of newspaper circulation from theAwl showing that the drop is an ongoing thing and that the latest sharp drops might signal the final days of newspapers.

Of course, newspaper executives don’t believe this (Newsosaur again)  -

Despite the obvious, long-running decline in circulation penetration, an amazing number of otherwise intelligent newspaper executives have been spending entirely too much time trying to spin audience numbers instead of acting to save what’s left of their rapidly wasting franchises.

Which brings us to an entirely different question i.e. where will people go for news?

NichePapers – A Tapestry of Niche News

While Google News, Yahoo News, and other news aggregators are getting flak and attention the one site that best represents the future of news (in my opinion) is TechMeme.

This is because news in the future will focus around two key concepts -

1. Niche – People will look for news that is interesting to them. This means they will pick niches that they are interested in and ignore everything else.  
2. The Tapestry Concept i.e. People will want a site to stitch together all the news in their niche of interest and present it in one place.

The key thing here is to stitch together sites that are dedicated to the Niche, and NOT newspaper articles (with a few exceptions).

TechMeme does this almost perfectly for Tech News. There is also Memeorandum for Political News and BallBug for baseball news. Two more examples (though much less refined) are Topix Search Pages and Mahalo’s human edited search pages.

Basically newspapers are going to be replaced by NichePapers fueled by people and sites that specialize in a niche.

NichePapers?

These are newspapers that revolve around a niche -

1. BallBug already does this for baseball – it’s a NichePaper that uses a mix of Hard Ball Times, Baseball Prospectus, FanGraphs, MLB Trade Rumors, and the best baseball focused sites.  
2. Hacker News from YCombinator already does this for coders/programmers.

There will be sites like this that crop up for every niche. Soon, they’ll be a better option than any newspaper for people interested in a niche.

NichePapers have to be focused on the sites that are passionate about a niche.

Taking newspaper articles like Google News does is not good enough. What you gain in trust and reputation you lose in watered down, unimaginative coverage. You can always include the exceptional newspaper writers – However, the future is not going to be news aggregation with 80% newspaper content.

The Future of Newspapers are NichePapers that have 80-90% coverage from niche sites.

Bonus: Why Amateurs will beat the Professionals

There are two main reasons – Passion/Committment and Variability of Quality.

Variablility of Quality 

Jakob Nielsen explains the variability of quality of bog posts.

If 50 people write about a topic, then even if 5 of them work at newspapers and are ‘trained journalists’ and are better than the others at writing, the randomness of things guarantees that over 100 posts each, the 5 newspaper journalist will not have the 500 best posts. In fact they will have less than 100 of the best 500 posts.

Which means 80% of the best posts are from untrained, not as skilled, bloggers and writers.

Passion/Committment

The second factor is that a blogger or writer who is writing out of passion and committment to his niche will have several advantages -

1. No censorship or need to be politically correct.  
2. He’s choosing freely. A niche may or may not be a journalist’s first preference. 
3. Focus. A journalist might write about Atlanta prospects once in 2 months. A niche blog writes about it every week (sometimes every day). 
4. Experience - A journalist might spend 2 weeks on a story and fly to 3 cities. However, that can’t compare with someone who’s been covering a niche for years, perhaps even decades.

Going back to Variablity of Quality, niche sites tend to produce a LOT more Quantity of posts than newspapers that cover everything.

Take 10 newspaper articles on Topic X and 1000 blog posts on Topic X and while the average rating of newspaper articles might be much higher -

1. The Top 10 posts overall would have only 1 or 2 newspaper articles.
2. Also, there are only 10 total newspaper articles so at least 90 of the top 100 posts MUST be blog posts.

Niche Focused Sites Will Win Out

Niche Writers might be journalistic dilettantes – However, they are often subject experts, and sometimes much, much more committed to an area.

Journalists are dilettantes when it comes to Niche Expertise. Unfortunately, Niche Expertise is what people are looking for. 

Google is in many ways the beginnings of a Tapestry of Niche Sites. TechMeme is improving that. We just need more NichePapers like TechMeme and more niche sites like TechCrunch.

Filed under: publishing Tagged: | future of newspapers, nichepapers