I’ve recently been reading Scholars an Rogues for its intelligent analysis[1]. An article on the future of newspapers comments on a move within the traditional[2] US newspaper market to reduce circulation and to focus on reaching only profitable customers. The article quotes a New York Times story[3]

It’s a rational business decision of newspapers focusing on quality circulation rather than quantity, shedding the subscribers who cost more and generate less revenue.

And so, in short the trend is that

Newspapers don’t want many of us to subscribe — because we cost too much to service. [...] the fact that I live in a rural area means that newspapers I want to read won’t deliver to my door. This phenomenon [...] has been growing.

as it was	as it is	and as it will be

Here are some stats about the 2006 US newspaper market from the same article

66 percent of readers are between ages 18 and 54.
51 percent have household incomes over $50,000 (16 percent over $100,000).
53 percent have some college experience or an undergraduate or graduate degree.
63 percent are married.
89 percent are white.

What is happening is that newspapers are limiting the geographical range within which they are willing to distribute(in order to make the cost model work), preferring to concentrate on urban centers. The qualitative comment of the article on this trend is to:

Begin writing the long-term obituary of the American newspaper [as] envisioned by the Founders as a public service and a significant component of the checks and balances that once allowed American democracy to function properly and purposefully.
[...]
[If the trend is for a] transition from [providing a] public-service(and making money) to protecting the profit margin [by selling] to core advertisers a Caucasian, home-owning, upper-middle class, well-paid, college-educated, urban audience, then what can be expected of the journalism those papers produce?

And so the basic threat posed by this trend is that the focus on profitable circulation will threaten the public service that newspapers have provided as a source of information, investigation and social comment. This is undeniably true, but I do think that it is somewhat alarmist. And so, my comments on this trend and on the author’s analysis.

Firstly, we have to accept that flagship newspapers[4] are no longer news carriers in the traditional sense. The fact is that they have become high-end media products that more closely resemble magazines[5] than what they do the traditional daily. The mega-brand papers are being consumed in the same way that readers consume Vanity Fair/New Yorker/Harpers/Wallpaper/Der Spiegel. This is not a trend driven by the newspaper publishers, it is driven by those white-collar, urban, caucasian consumers to whom the newspaper publishers are responding. And in that light the newspapers will produce journalism that their readers want, whatever that might be. Commercial journalism is no longer about bringing instruction or understanding to the eager masses who sit at the feet of the master journalists to learn of the evils that their government are perpetrating. It’s about satisfying their consumers’ appetite for media[6].

Secondly, who gives a fuck about how the US Founding Fathers envisioned newspapers? The Founding Fathers of the modern Afrikaner nation in South Africa also envisioned newspapers as a public service – just a particularly skewed one. The founding fathers of any nation are no longer relevant. Democracy has changed – it’s protection can no longer be left to a caring elite of journalists. Our information demands have changed, we want access to information from a variety of sources in a variety of formats. And newspapers make up only a portion(if any) of this demand. The sanctity of the Word as spoken by The Whatever Times is irrelevant to the modern society who 10 or 20 years ago did accept that word as a daily sacrament.

Which brings me to newspapers in South Africa. There has been a similar acceleration in the decline in circulation of the traditional South African newspapers. But this has been rendered trivial by an explosive growth in the lower end daily newspaper market that does not cater to the white/caucasian market, but to the increasingly mobile, mostly black, working class. The earth shattering arrival of the Daily Sun has caused a revolution in the South African newspaper industry – its rapid rise to market dominance[7] has surprised even the most Africa-aggressive media analysts. It has become, within the last four years, the only newspaper that matters and it is now the first nationwide daily newspaper in South Africa’s history.

The Daily Sun is undeniably a tabloid, containing a hefty dose of stories on crime, revenge, witchcraft and wild parties; but there is more to it than its first two pages and I would argue that it is more relevant to the public interest than what euro-ripoff old-skool papers like Beeld, Die Burger and the Independents are.
Beyond its headline grabbers it has realised the value of addressing their readers’ upward mobility in the form of articles on everything from how to get out of micro-loan debt to applying for a mortgage for a first house.
By focusing on news that is relevant to their readers, in a language that their readers are comfortable with[8] the paper is serving its readers better than what any Pulitzer prize toting 5000-word-per-capita-per-a-day newsroom could.

To be fair, the explosion driven by the Daily Sun has resulted in a series of low-end tabloids such as the Son or *shudder* the Daily Voice that offer up some hilarious headlines and page 3 girls with their all-natural boobs out, but little in the way of investigation or comment. But this is no different than what Murdoch did to the UK with The Sun.

The Daily Sun	Kaapse Son	The Cape Sun

Another trend which is only now developing in the South African market is the rise of the free mega-daily in the form of the bet-the-company project of the Sunday Times[9] which is to deliver a free daily newspaper to their(country-wide) subscribers – The Times. At first I was extremely skeptical of The Times since I could not see how they could make the distribution model work for daily, selective, door-to-door deliveries of a newspaper whose only income is through advertising[10]. And in that sense The Times is in a similar situation as that described by the author, the cost of distribution weighing down the reach of a newspaper and thereby prompting it to reduce its circulation. But I was wrong – purely because I didn’t understand the genius distribution model of The Times; they distribute that motherfucker on foot!
This would, of course, never work in the US or Europe, but in South Africa there is no cheaper form of last-mile transport than by human carrier. The only snag in this distribution could be in getting the selective distribution right (i.e. delivering the newspaper to the right houses in a neighbourhood). The Times is already showing the potential to turn the South African middle-class newspaper market on its head by swallowing whole the markets both for traditional regional dailies and for free community(middle-class suburban) newspapers.

So where does this leave investigative journalism as a public service? Firstly, high-end newspapers are certainly not interested in the public anymore. Secondly democracy today cannot function as envisioned by the US Founders – a college of benign care-providers to the nation with a balancing college of intellectuals and journalists – that world does not exist anymore and nor does that role for the mega-daily newspapers. But the void left by the magazination of the traditional flagship newspaper will be filled by something – not because democracy requires it, but because there will be a commercial demand for it. And that something, whether it be free dailies or low cost tabloid-format, non-trash newspapers will report on the stories that their readers want, not what is good for their readers.
And is this bad? Is the loss of a daily, paternalistic schooling of the masses by revered journalists bad? I don’t think so.

The future is about the individual – the death of the public interest and the supremacy of individual interest. The future balancing of democracy, a lumbering social system in terrible health in its old age, is not in the public forum of teacher-journalists but in the individual’s freedom to access whatever information they want, be it truths about their nation’s foreign policy or the latest on Lindsay Lohan’s nasal cavity.

[1] on politics, media, corporates, social issues – a thinking blog
[2] read dominant
[3] Funny, one of America’s largest newspapers[i] writing about its own drop in ‘standards’
[i] dwarfed by USA Today whose daily circulation tops 2 million copies[ii]
[ii] though, should we even consider USA PropagandaToday a newspaper?
[4] The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, London times, Guardian and BILDs of the world
[5] In terms of its focus, content and even editorial policies
[6] Which does still include an appetite for investigation and analysis, but also for culture, travel, fashion, gossip and sex
[7] 500,000 copies sold per day, which translates to some 4 million readers per day. In a country of 46 million people that is phenomenal
[8] Not slang, but simplified English
[9] South Africa’s ‘most respectable’ gossip/trash/investigation newspaper[i]
[i] another hilarious story is the development of South Africa’s traditional newspapers. The Sunday Times has become all about the trash and the once-mighty Rapport is now relegated to being the rugby newspaper – pure comedy.
[10] If you ignore the revenue from new subscribers which supplements the cost of producing The Times