The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging has extrapolated information from University of North Carolina journalism-school professor Phil Meyer to determine that the very last newspaper will land on doorsteps in April 2043.
I’ve said in a past entry that I’m OK with the inevitable death of newspapers as long as they don’t predecease me. Given that I plan to live to 100, 2043 isn’t quite going to cut it.
Even now, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press reports 
that for 40 percent of survey respondents, the Internet is their primary news source, for 70 percent, it’s TV news, and for just 35 percent, it’s newspapers (the numbers add up to more than 100 percent because respondents could give multiple answers).
Newspaper journalism is moving inexorably online. “Multimedia” and “interactive” are becoming the watchwords. At the Society for New Design, Tyson Evans blogged about interactive and multimedia highlights of 2008, noting “a spectrum of technologies and storytelling methods” that are indeed worth a look. Tyson cites my grade-school pal Jeff Jarvis, who writes:
The story was all we had before — it’s what would fit onto a newspaper page or into a broadcast show. But a discrete and serial series of articles over days cannot adequately cover the complex stories going on now nor can they properly inform the public. There’s too much repetition. Too little explanation. The knowledge is not cumulative. Each instance is necessarily shallow. And when more big stories come — as they have lately! — in scarce time and space and with scarce resources, each becomes even shallower. We never catch up, we never get smarter. Articles perpetuate a Ground Hog Day kind of journalism.
Here are a few story-based methods that may not save the venerable print newspaper but may save news-publishing organizations, even as they change their approaches:
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- Blogging: The shift to online journalism seems to be helping many newspapers. Some have cut back on — or completely eliminated — print editions in favor of online formats. LATimes.com, the online incarnation of the LA Times, boosted readership 143 percent, primarily through the use of blogs.
- Exceptional multimedia storytelling: Sites like MediaStorm are “usher[ing] in the next generation of multimedia storytelling by publishing social documentary projects incorporating photojournalism, interactivity, animation, audio and video for distribution across multiple media.”
- Interactive databases: I don’t entirely understand interactive databases, but long-time journalist Steve Buttry says he’s used databases for more than a decade. In a report to Newspaper Next (which costs $19.95), Buttry explains how communication companies can use interactive databases to shape a prosperous future. He also cites iowafloodstories as an example of an interactive database. (Elsewhere on the Web, Buttry offers a primer on the most traditional elements of writing a good journalistic story.)
- Liveblogging. Buttry notes the development of liveblogging as a storytelling form. Liveblogging is popular at conferences, and folks have liveblogged events such as the Hudson River plane crash. I made a lame, technology-plagued attempt to liveblog the inauguration of Barack Obama and am not a bit surprised that the New York Times did a much better job of it.
- Visuals. Seeming to acknowledge that 70 percent that gets its news primarily through TV, newspapers are increasingly it their stock-in-trade to tell stories visually. An article by Dane Stickney last fall in the American Journalism Review debated the merits of the “charticle,” “combinations of text, images and graphics that take the place of a full article.” Stickney reported on Josh Awtry, who has the reputation as a “story killer” because of his “steadfast support for the short, graphic-driven alternate story form,” the charticle. Stickney quotes Awtry as defending the practice: “I’m not out to destroy narrative. Just bad narrative.” Apparently my own local newspaper, the Orlando Sentinel is a hotbed of charticle-ism. The Poynter Institute found that “alternative story forms like charticles did a better job of catching readers’ attention than traditional narratives,” Stickney reports. Opponents note that techniques like charticles that cater to readers’ short attention spans tend to become self-fulfilling. We become so accustomed to short, easy-to-digest forms that longer, word-filled narratives become daunting. But, Stickney notes, “readers also want to be told stories in longer, captivating ways, in compelling traditional narratives.”
- Other Alternate Story Forms: Barbara Allen and Kelsea Gurski blog at the Newspaper Association of America about alternate story forms or “alts,” which according to the Chris Courtney, design director of Chicago Tribune’s free news and entertainment tabloid Red Eye, are “scannable, focused, reader-driven, non-narrative piece in which readers consume information in chunks.” These “alts” are said to yield greater information retention than traditional narratives do. (But are they as enjoyable to read?). Courtney includes charticles on a list that also comprises breakout boxes, timelines, Topic 101 (breaking the idea into key facts). how tos, graphic novels, quizzes, catch-ups (to reorient the reader with previous events), and combinations of these “alts.”
- Capitalizing on pattern recognition and the need for coherence. Howard C. Weaver of the McClatchey newspaper company reprinted in a blog a speech he had given to a group of publishers and editors in the late 1990s. Though newspapers have changed drastically and the market has become exponentially more difficult even since then, Weaver’s words still offer hope for the printed newspaper:
I honestly believe that most of the persistent, misguided talk you hear about the inevitable demise of newspapers is based on one simpleminded fact: that the act of printing words on paper simply seems out-dated. Because these critics and naysayers do not realize that we’re appealing to basic human capacities and meeting basic, primal needs [pattern recognition and the need for coherence], they mistakenly conclude that the service we provide will be easily replaced by some flashier, more beguiling product — any day now.
But the fact is that while text seems old fashioned, it remains by far the most efficient way to transfer complex information.
Weaver notes that the printed word has going for it the fact that it’s asynchronous — “you don’t have to listen to the story in the order it’s spoken. It’s also permanent. Good reporting and writing transfers power because you can read n 10 minutes what took the reporter 10 hours to report and write.
The ultimate power of the written word, though, is storytelling, Weaver asserts. Weaver ends by talking about his time at the Anchorage Daily News:
At the Daily News, we wanted to be Alaska’s tribal fire, the place where Alaskans gathered to tell the stories that defined themselves as a people. That same aspiration is alive and engaged at the newspaper today, and it is one in which you all can readily and profitably share. You’re the storytellers, and the power and the magic of a tale well told rests well within your grasp.
Can any medium other than newspapers tell the stories that define a people? What must newspapers do to maintain that role? The debate continues.