The Decline — or Not — of the Newspaper

Making the rounds is a story from the Washington Post called “Hard News” about how print newspapers are struggling against the free and easy Web.

It’s easy to say that the Web is where people will get their news, and that traditional news organizations will join or die. Heck, I get most of my news from CNN.com, Google News, and USAToday.com.

But there’s something interesting I wanted to point out. From the article:

In 2003, the New York Times’ Web site became profitable for the first time; last year, The Post’s Web site did the same.

I find this interesting because the article doesn’t tell us what expenses these sites have. Do either pay the salaries of the reporters who provide most of the content? Do either chip in for AP news or Reuters?

It strikes me as pretty easy to make a profit if you don’t have to pay for your content.

Let’s say that readers across the land drop their newspapers in favor of the Web — that print subscriptions fall 95 percent and papers begin to fold and reporters fill the unemployment lines.

Where, I wonder, will those Web sites get the news? Without papers to pay for it, the Associated Press won’t be able to field nearly as many reporters. Free sites can’t generate enough advertising to pay for reporters, and even the b1oggers have to get their news from somewhere. The people who go to Google News or what-have-you would suddenly find their news disappearing.

Getting something for nothing is great, but without the popularity of the ad-supported versions — TV or print — those couldn’t exist. Nor could the AP, nor Google News, nor many of the now-free sites. And even a subscription model would need to be awfully pricey to pay for a remotely decent-sized reporting crew.

That doesn’t mean that papers won’t suffer. But the pendulum might well swing back once people realize that good news is hard to come by, and newspapers — perhaps in another form — make a comeback.