The Lantern to cut Friday print edition
Move further signals growing threat to print publications
By: Jim Coyne
Posted: 4/29/09
More than three years ago, The Lantern cut circulation from 28,000 to 15,000. Last summer the paper ended its print publication, and in fall 2009, the Friday print edition will be eliminated.Ohio State is not the first university to do this. Syracuse, Minnesota, Alabama, Texas Christian and Utah cut their Friday editions to save money.
"Friday has always been a slow advertising day and slow distribution day because of the decreased activity on campus," said John Milliken, general manager of The Lantern. "The current economic conditions across the board are affecting all businesses."
The Web site will be redesigned and the Friday edition will be published online. There will be more multimedia with news and the navigation of the site will be made much simpler.
"There's an increased focus of online multimedia," Milliken said. "It is becoming the norm instead of the exception in the journalism industry."
To make up for the cut, administrators are considering special weekend editions of the newspaper to cover events such as graduation and home football games, said Tom O'Hara, adviser to The Lantern.
"The online product will have the same strength and value of a print edition," Milliken said.
An account-by-account analysis conducted by the business staff at the newspaper showed that Friday advertisement sales could comfortably shift to Thursday.
The Business Office for The Lantern is also undergoing change. Five new positions at the office were filled in the past few weeks and two more are being sought for fall.
"If you don't try something new, you're never going to grow," Milliken said. "A lot of what's going to be new in media is probably going to grow out of university environments."
During the upcoming summer, The Lantern's multimedia room is undergoing remodeling to better equip students with the technology used in online coverage.
Other recent changes include the incorporation of the Arts & Entertainment section into a weekly edition called btw.
"Students are finding a niche for it and we've had a steady advertisement growth since it started April 1," Milliken said.
Milliken has been the business manager of The Lantern since January and brings 30 years of experience in the newspaper business.
"The primary benefit is to give our students an opportunity for online publication to better prepare themselves for work in the news industry," Milliken said. "It helps us to concentrate on being a better news supplier for campus."
A girl in my economics class completely refused to believe or accept that newspapers might someday be obsolete. "I LIKE to hold a copy in my hands- and besides, what would students read before class?", she said. What will we read before class? Already laptops are a common occurrence in classrooms: not only that, but increasingly powerful cell phone/mobile web capabilities already have us doing everything from checking e-mail to updating blogs to reading the Times on our cells. As for the physicality of holding a copy in your hands... Well, I think the people have already spoken on this issue: they've decided convenience (i.e. up to the minute news and information at one's fingertips at all times via a cell phone) vs.... the unclear benefits of having a paper copy of the paper.
To be honest, I still don't know how I feel about this touchy subject. Why do you like to have a paper copy of a paper or a book? I love the look and feel of books, opening one and smelling the newness and excitement of the story to be told. I think a lot of people share this feeling, and I don't mean to suggest we burn all the books or completely cease to make them. But practically, maybe this is a love that is better left behind. Think of the environmental benefits of a world without paper, for example. Think of the space saved in your house, the junk drawers filled with documents and clippings you can't throw away. Think of how easy it is to back up and copy a digital file vs. the expense of a second book or paper.
Do you have a genuine argument for the book or paper? I would love to hear it- I don't mean to simply kick the medium while it's down.
I must admit that my reasons for choosing non-digital media are mostly for selfish reasons. Mostly. Part of it is the tactile pleasure I get from holding the book as I read it. The feeling of... tradition? Nostalgia? Though I'm not sure how to describe that feeling, there is something about the medium that can enhance the experience of consuming media for me. Secondly, I enjoy possessing books. The image of a nineteenth-century manor with a room filled floor-to-ceiling with books is one that I personally associate with wealth, specifically 'old money'. When I fill a cheap particle-board bookshelf with third-rate science fiction books, a tiny piece (really, really tiny) of that sort of wealth. It's a look I like.
ReplyDeleteThere are other, more practical reasons to have a preference for Old Media. For one, I find a traditional book easier to navigate. Though most books are read a page a time in an ovbious sequencial order, some books are used for reference purposes. A website might be easy to search, but that's not always the case for a PDF file. The act of flipping from one section of a book to another is something I find easier to do in a analog book while typing in random page numbers in Adobe Reader I find annoying and tedious. But again, that's more a personal preference rather than a severe limitation.
However, there is the issue of the lifespan of a standard. There are text files written 30 years ago using a word processor that no longer exists, for an operating system that noone remembers, and saved on a medium noone knows how to read. Without a costly reverse-engineeering of each of those things, that data is essentially gone. While computers are more prevalent now then they were three decades ago and standards are more... standard, it's not impossible to imagine that the same may hold true for the data on the hard drive of your average Kindle decades or centuries from now. Unless we continually re-copy our written data to each standard as it comes out (which would become an increasingly difficult venture as humanity corpus of knowlege grows exponentially) a given digital copy of something will eventually become unaccessable. And that doesn't even go into the issue of what to do with DRM-encryped files when the company that keeps that music or eBook unlocked goes out of business. A book, however is never encrypted. Its lifespan is only limited to the durability of the material from which it's made, a limitation that also applies to digial media. That Bible printed by Gutenburg is just as easy to use as it was in his day (assuming you can read the language it uses, again a limitation that applies to digial text).
All that being said, I'm hardly a Luddite. I do love new technology and New Media. I also happen to love playing Devil's Advocate.
lots of things i'd like to address on this topic...
ReplyDeletefirst of all, having experienced both a computer crash and a power outage are really all i need to be convinced that "old media" will be around a lot longer than the next decade - there is a reason print has been as enduring a medium as it has and i'd like to highlight a few of them.
longevity - yes, paper can be burned or torn up or water-logged or even just decay in sunlight like a lot of my brittle pulp, high-acid content paperbacks from the mid-50s. but paper also doesn't need to be recharged or plugged in or used with an adaptor... it's a remarkably simple and effective process for getting information across.
it's cheap and familiar. i know a lot of people can't imagine life without the internet or texting but there are millions of people in this country who have no idea how to use those things and little interest in learning. some of that is because of age, it's true, and a lot of those people will eventually just die anyway. but a lot of it also has to do with income and education - and, while a lot of people don't read books or newspapers anyhow, i think the number of people who could will always be larger than the number of people who'll go looking for that same information online. and that's just in this country - i'm not even getting into the question of the world outside our borders.
that said... newspapers ARE dying out. the economic models that supported them for centuries haven't held true, for a variety of reasons: radio, television and certainly the internet are all much, much more immediate, more colorful and louder [cheaper is debatable but it's true in some instances] ways of communicating information than the newspaper.
to me, the question then is: what can a newspaper do better? and there are still plenty of things newspaper CAN and DO manage to do better than other media... not always, but this is where newspapers should find their focus and, to use the term, "develop their niche."
newspapers can spend more time on a subject and treat the reader to a more complete, in-depth analysis or exploration - it's rare to get any real time to talk about anything on TV. [public radio does an excellent job in this regard, but it might be even more marginal a business model than newspapers...]
i would also argue that it is perhaps time for newspapers to throw up their hands and concede that they have lost the race to be "first" - given the time it takes to research, write and then print and deliver a newspaper... well, just about every other mass media will be able to do it faster and easier. even the internet wins here, by being able to essentially remove the last two steps: an online reporter can pretty much get in front of the reader a few moments after finishing their work.
i think newspapers need to think more about providing the sort of good writing and information gathering that people want and NEED to read, and worry less about maintaining their status as a member of the dying old media.
stop charging subscription fees and rely on advertising - the closing of The Onion branches on the west coast illustrate that this isn't a universally successful idea, but -in general - i'm not sure the subscription and distribution models newspapers have relied on still work, or justify their own expense.
i also think that exploring some level of government funding - while remaining editorial independence - is probably an idea whose time has come; if the market won't support a free press, then the government might have to - giving papers tax-exempt status would probably be a step in the right direction, as would extending civil service pay and benefits to their employees. [i worked for a paper for five years, at a company that wouldn't hire anyone in the newsroom without a bachelor's degree and i made less money than people i knew who had dropped out of high school and taken the GED.]
lastly, i think newspapers need to do a better job of sharing and promoting good work - wire services were designed in part to do this but far, far too much good work winds up in recycling bins and is treated as disposable, transitory information - if the industry itself doesn't do a better job of promoting and showcasing it's best work, why should we expect anyone else to care about it?