If Roger Fiedler's career has any meaning, it's this: Sometimes, you can see the future coming but you crush it anyway.
Thirty years ago, Mr. Fiedler was a media executive pushing a reassuring vision for the future of newspapers. The digital revolution would free news from the printing presses and give people portable devices that keep them informed throughout the day. Some stories will be enhanced by video, others by audio and animation. Readers can share articles, promoting engagement across diverse communities.
It all happened, more or less. Everyone is online all the time, and almost everyone seems interested, if not obsessed, with national and world events. But the traditional media that Mr. Fiedler championed are not receiving much benefit. After decades of decline, its collapse appears to be accelerating.
Every day brings bad news. Sometimes it's about newly founded digital enterprises, sometimes it's about venerable publications that are more than a century old.
Cuts were just announced at Law360, The Intercept, and youth-oriented video site NowThis, which laid off half its staff. The technology news site Engadget, which comprehensively tracks layoffs in the tech industry, has laid off senior editors and other staff. Condé Nast and Time are laying off employees. The continued existence of Vice Media, once worth $5.7 billion, and Sports Illustrated, in another era the most influential sports magazine, is uncertain. The Los Angeles Times and Washington Post eliminated hundreds of journalists between them. One in four newspapers that existed in 2005 no longer does.
The slow collapse of newspapers and magazines would be of limited benefit except for one thing: traditional media had, at their core, the lofty and difficult task of communicating information around the world. From investigative reporting on government to coverage of local politicians, the news has helped make all the institutions and individuals covered more transparent, and perhaps more honest.
Advice columns, movie reviews, recipes, inventory data, weather reports, and everything else in newspapers have easily moved online—except the news itself. Local and regional coverage has had difficulty establishing itself as a profitable offering.
Now there are signs that the whole concept of “news” is fading away. When asked where they get their local news, almost as many respondents to a Gallup poll said social media as newspapers and magazines. A recent attempt to give people free subscriptions to their local newspapers in Pennsylvania as part of an academic study attracted almost no candidates.
“Shortly after the advent of the printing press in the 15th century, manuscript copy rooms in monasteries quickly began closing,” said Mr. Fiedler, who is now 81 and lives in retirement in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The majority of newspapers remain in the United States.
The decline of news media has paralleled the division of American society, which is now as angry and divided as it has been since the height of the Vietnam War and civil rights protests more than half a century ago. As the media declined, the noise level rose.
Maybe it could have been different. Contrary to the myth that all newspaper moguls in the 1980s and 1990s believed the good times would last forever, quite a few of them saw trouble lurking in the distance.
Mr. Fiedler spent 21 years at Knight Ridder, a newspaper chain that published major dailies in cities such as Miami and San Jose, California. One early project was Viewtron, an attempt to put terminals in people's homes to deliver news, shopping and chat. It provided too little and cost too much. In 1986, Viewtron was closed.
What Mr. Fiedler took away from Viewtron's failure was that newspaper readers needed something that felt like a newspaper and didn't squeeze their wallet. He helped develop lightweight tablet technology that used low-cost but clear, bright flat screens with relatively long battery life.
Such shows did not exist in the early 1990s, but were promised by the end of the decade. The newspaper will be broadcast via high-speed digital telephone networks or live broadcast via satellite. “I think this will be the salvation for traditional, serious newspapers,” Thomas Winship, a longtime editor at the Boston Globe, told the New York Times in a 1992 story about Mr. Fiedler.
While at least some publishers were convinced, tablets never came to newspapers' rescue. One problem was the lack of consensus on a software standard. Tablets didn't really become usable until Apple introduced the iPad in 2010. But the real problem facing the news industry was the emergence of a disruptive and unexpected competitor: the Internet.
“I was focusing too narrowly,” Mr. Fiedler admitted.
The Internet would initially create an alternative to print newspapers and magazines, then become a competitor, and eventually eliminate many of them. “I had not considered all the potential cross-effects of emerging technologies that would give rise to Craigslist, alternative news sites, social media and other products that would dramatically reduce newspaper circulation and advertising revenues,” Mr. Fiedler said.
Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web in 1989 as a tool for collaboration and information exchange. Being amorphous and infinitely flexible, it allowed for both slow converters and fast converters at the same time, circumventing the kind of hand-holding of readers that Mr. Fiedler believed was necessary. Newspapers lost their online classified ads almost immediately. Display ads continued to exist, but Google, Facebook, and later Amazon captured this market.
By allowing every voice to be heard in the same volume, the Internet has encouraged publishers to join the party. Newspapers and magazines simply gave away what they asked for in physical form. They were pushed by Silicon Valley, which needed high-quality content to keep people online and using its technology.
“Publishers have gotten this misconception that content is like a commodity and should be available everywhere for free,” Mr. Fiedler said. The paywall took years to establish, at which point many posts were fatally weakened.
The good old days weren't good
Despite all the gloom surrounding the media, the situation is contradictory.
Reliable local reporting in many places is sparse or non-existent. But there is also a much greater variety of foreign, national and cultural news available online than previous generations could get in print. Despite celebrating the good old days, if you were in a city with mediocre newspapers — and there were a lot of them — access to good journalism was difficult.
“Basically, the world has opened up to us. There's a lot of good journalism out there,” said David Mindich, a professor of journalism at Temple University's Klein School of Media and Communications. “If you had said to me twenty years ago, 'I see a generation that listens to long-form podcasts,' I would have said, 'Attention spans.' “I'm getting shorter. I don't think that's going to happen.'” But she did.
Most long-form podcasts, even at their best, are not news: a zoning commission report, for example, is news. The erosion of the idea of news can be seen most clearly in the magazine sphere. Where once the goal was to inform, it is now entertainment.
“Time Magazine just chose Taylor Swift as Person of the Year,” said Samir Hosni, the magazine's veteran analyst. “Elvis or the Beatles were never chosen. She was the first female artist. We have become more focused on marketing in the press than on truth in the press because we rely on the customer to pay the price rather than advertising.”
This is how digital technology has changed journalism, he said: “The goal now is to make everyone happy. But that has never been the role of journalism, which is to make people happy.”
Marc Benioff, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur who bought struggling Time magazine in 2018 with his wife, Lynn, looked at Ms. Swift's selection differently: “Best-selling issue ever!” (In recent years, at least). A few weeks after Swift's issue appeared, Time magazine's union said that 15% of the magazine's unionized editorial staff had been fired.
Mr. Benioff said that was more of a strategic move than a sign of distress.
“If you want to make these media companies successful, you have to change the product mix, which also means you have to change the employee mix,” he wrote in a text message. The paywall, which was implemented in 2011, was scrapped last year. As a brand, Time needs the widest possible exposure.
Two years ago, Benioff told Axios that Time magazine's revenue would rise 30% in 2022 to $200 million. Maybe that was ambitious. “Revenues in 2024 should reach $200 million, which is a new record,” he says now. “We'll even make money.”
Other publications try to keep the profit motive out of journalism.
Nonprofit news projects tend to be small, low-profile, and unevenly distributed across regions. But there are many signs of growth. The number of groups serving communities of color — which traditional publications have not served well — has doubled in the past five years, according to the Nonprofit News Institute.
Readers generally respond, too.
“People talk about nonprofit reporting in their communities as if it were a natural part of the news ecosystem, rather than like an outside force,” says Magda Konieczna, author of Journalism Without Profit: Making News When the Market Fails. In some places, the effect is stunning. “Philadelphia is now a news jungle, not a news desert.”
Ms. Konieczna teaches at Concordia University in Montreal. A few weeks ago, Canadian news giant Bell Media announced it would cut hundreds of jobs and end many of its television newscasts. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the decision “undermines our very democracy.”
“My neighbors read The New Yorker but don’t know where to find local news, or why they want it, largely because it doesn’t really exist,” Ms. Konieczna said. “This is a dystopian future.”
The New Yorker happened to employ A. J. Liebling, the greatest newspaper critic of the postwar years. He described himself as an optimist despite seeing a downward spiral since he became a reporter in 1925.
“The function of journalism in society is to inform, but its role is to make money,” he wrote. The more she did the latter, he said, the less bothered she was by the former.
There was no golden age, but Roger Fiedler remains inconsolable. It has long outgrown Knight Ridder, which was sold to McClatchy, another chain, in 2006. McClatchy declared bankruptcy in 2020. He spends a few hours each day reading news in the print edition of a community newspaper and the digital versions of national newspapers . And regional newspapers. It's a lot, but it's not enough.
“We were inundated with social media and its comments,” he said. “We are inundated with information because everyone is a journalist. Everyone thinks they have the truth. Of course everyone has an opinion. It is frustrating to see how it has disappeared.”
