Throw out the lifeline with hand quick and strong:
Why do you tarry, why linger so long?
See! he is sinking; oh, hasten today
And out with the lifeboat! away, then away!
(Refrain:)
Throw out the lifeline! Throw out the lifeline!
Someone is drifting away;
Throw out the lifeline! Throw out the lifeline!
Someone is sinking today.
– From the hymn by Edwin S. Ufford, 1888.
Today I was one of six lecturers at the annual kickoff symposium for “Know Your Chicago,” a 61-year-old fall tour series run out of the University of Chicago’s Graham School of General Studies. What quickly became clear as I delivered my talk, “When Worlds Collide: The Journalist, Technology, and the Audience,” was that this particular audience … several hundred folks who were mostly my age and older, mostly women … was deeply invested in being reassured about their morning newspapers.
In fact, I was only interrupted by applause twice, and then only in the Q&A: once when I said I was one of those folks who valued having a printed paper in the morning, and once when I opined that some newspapers would certainly be around as long as I am (or words to that effect). This after I had pointed out that Col. McCormick’s classic definition of a newspaper —
“The newspaper is an institution developed by modern civilization to present the news of the day, to foster commerce and industry, to inform and lead public opinion, and to furnish that check upon government which no constitution has ever been able to provide.”
— really didn’t require that the newspaper actually exist in newsprint form. What folks cherish is the idea of a newspaper, whether the Colonel’s or someone else’s.
Google Fast Flip
As so frequently happens (though more generally on a Monday than a Tuesday), the morning’s New York Times brought yet another newspaper-industry-lifeline story: the rollout of Google Fast Flip,
“a web application that lets users discover and share news articles. It combines qualities of print and the Web, with the ability to ‘flip’ through pages online as quickly as flipping through a magazine.” (description from the Fast Flip ‘About’ page)
Quoth developer Krishna Bharat, who came up with Google News in 2002: “Browsing news on the Web is much slower than it is in print. When it is fast, people will look at more news and more ads, and that’s something that publishers want to see.” Oh, and the publishers who opt in to this are doing some kind of revshare with the big GOOG.
Okay, fine. But I’m afraid this particular lifeline is a little frayed. I think the version that author Miguel Helft posted on the NYT’s “Bits” blog yesterday hews closer to the truth: Google “is willing to pay publishers if those publishers, in turn, allow Google to do more with their content than it was doing before.”
Now, maybe I was too flippant early in my speech about some of the adjustments these faithful newspaper readers will be making over the next handful of years if they want both to be informed and to have ink-stained fingers. (I can’t resist trying to make a roomful of people chuckle.) But when I got down to being serious, the message was:
- Demand that your news organizations (not newspapers) be convenient, be relevant, and be fun.
- Demand that their journalists be accurate, be self-aware, and be adaptable.
- And demand of yourself that you will seek value and value relevance … and, when given the chance, pay for it.
And the heck with lifelines that don’t quite get over the side of the boat.
Update: Steve Outing feels somewhat differently in his post from Sept. 17: “I’m happy to see Google executives decide that it might be in their interests to share some ad revenues with media publishers. Fast Flip will be an experiment we’ll all be watching closely. Perhaps it will lead to a news-industry revenue source that starts to chip away at the News Crisis we find ourselves in.”