The News Media Crisis: Newspapers or Viewspapers?

Why are you presently reading the online Times of Israel – and not some Israeli (Hebrew or English-language) print newspaper? Indeed, why are you probably also reading all your news exclusively online? Here’s my take.

The traditional (“legacy”) news media are in crisis, doubly so. First, they are losing readers, listeners, and viewers to social media, where (especially young) people are increasingly turning for their news. Second, the public seems to be placing less trust in the traditional media, whether in their print or online versions.

In theory, these two phenomena could be connected, in different directions. One way could be that lower trustworthiness of social media, with its unintended misinformation and intentional disinformation, is influencing how the public also views the traditional media – an osmosis effect. Or alternatively, because of declining trust in legacy media the public is increasingly turning to non-traditional venues for their news consumption.

However, the first explanation begs the question as to why people leave their legacy media news providers in the first place. There are probably several factors involved here; I’m going to focus on one that actually (indirectly) has made the news recently. Last month, The New York Times made this announcement that received widespread mention in other media: “The New York Times editorial board will no longer make endorsements in New York elections, including in races for governor and mayor of New York City” (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/12/business/media/the-new-york-times-editorial-board-political-endorsements.html), although it would continue endorsing specific candidates for the U.S. Presidency.

The Times would not explain its decision, but it seems clear that it’s an attempt to reverse course regarding a trend that has been accelerating the past few decades: blurring of news and views – in virtually every traditional newspaper (and news radio/TV station) around the western world.

Why did this happen? The internet. From the newspaper’s inception several hundred years ago until the 1990s, the news would be offered once a day. The subscriber or newsstand buyer would pick it up in the morning and read about what happened yesterday. When TV news programs entered the picture (pun intended), they shortened the news cycle but usually still had a time lag of several hours. The internet, of course, decimated this approach; news was now what was really “new” i.e., occurred minutes or at most an hour ago.

Print newspapers could not compete at that time level. Most were also a bit late in starting their own online version of the paper, as the new news media (e.g., The Huffington Post in the U.S., The Times of Israel that you are presently reading) ate into their traditional subscriber base. But if one can’t compete on the “news,” perhaps they could compete on another level? That’s where they turned into “viewspapers.”

To be sure, news media always included some commentary (opinion pages i.e., “op-ed”), easily distinguished from the news pages. However, the situation called for a more radical shift of “views” into what used to be strictly news pages. After all, if a reader picked up the paper and read a headline that had already been published online several hours earlier, at some point they would cease buying the paper altogether.

What do such “views” consist of? A smattering of hard news accompanied by opinion (Who is right? Who’s wrong?) along with lots of prognostication (“this is where we’ll end up in this story”). Indeed, newspapers have turned into “prophets” – not only predicting the future, but also doing so in apocalyptic fashion: the world is coming to an end because of global warming; the possible outbreak of WW3; the end of our civilization as we know it due to mass immigration; the next pandemic is right around the corner; the economy is at the cusp of another major crisis or at least severe downturn; and so on.

Even if “your” newspapers don’t indulge in such doomsday prophesying, start looking at them from the standpoint of the balance between “news” and “views” (opinion, predictions, etc.). Then try this exercise: cut out or print out those “views” and put them aside – and retrieve them a some weeks or a few months later (depending on the topic) and see just how well they did in their “futuristic” analysis. I’ve done so (albeit not in academic, systematic fashion; here’s a great topic for a PhD student to tackle), and the results are almost laughable. No wonder trust has declined!

What, then, can the legacy media do to salvage the situation? Awhile back I co-authored an academic article that added a third category to the usual “hard news/soft news” dichotomy (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249689936_Hard_news_soft_news_’general’_news_The_necessity_and_utility_of_an_intermediate_classification). Hard news is what happened very recently (e.g., just published inflation rate, terror attack, etc.); soft news involves information that might be interesting but useless (e.g., movie star gossip, celebrity death, regular sports info). Between these two lies a huge category called “general news,” important things that don’t have a short shelf life: the latest medical breakthrough; important legislation advancing in the legislature; new inventions; climate change data; social trends (immigration, crime); and so on. Indeed, it is this type of general news that impacts our lives far more than most “hard news” of a very temporary nature.

Given the human resources of traditional media – investigators, reporters, fact-checkers, editors – it is this general news that they should be concentrating on, leaving the ephemeral (so-called “hard news”) for social media and other relatively lightly-(wo)manned news purveyors. To be sure, this entails not merely reporting “general news”, but also (especially!) analyzing why it’s important i.e., how it will affect our lives (with appropriate modesty in “predicting” its future). In short, regarding truly important and lasting phenomena, well-reasoned “views” should be part of the reportage as long as it’s not shooting from the hip as is usually the case in op-ed commentary.

Every changing “ecology” demands of its inhabitants the ability to adapt and find its best niche. This is no less true of media ecology. “Traditional” newspapers still have an important role to play, but only if they find the role in which they can best bring their resources to bear for the public “interest” (double entendre).