Newspapers Should Stick To Their Strengths

Old media should be worried less with breaking stories and more with providing context and insight.

At the beginning of the 20th century, many newspapers printed three editions a day – morning, noon, and evening – to keep up with the news. Today, this role has shifted to the internet.

The problem is, newspapers still think it is their duty to report the news. As long as they cling to this idea, they will only continue to decline. They just can’t compete with the up-to-the-minute coverage of news, sports, and entertainment available on the internet.

If newspapers are to survive, they need to focus on their unique strengths: investigative reporting and providing context, analysis, and insight in a more condensed, comprehensible way – basically everything that goes beyond just reporting the facts.

What constitutes the core of a newspaper for me is the "Feuilleton." The Feuilleton originated in France in the 1800s and is still popular today in Continental Europe. In Germany, specifically, it refers to the arts and literary section of the newspaper, and includes cultural critiques, reviews, opinion pieces, and essays on anything from architecture to video games to politics.

Sometimes there are even feuilleton battles between different newspapers, with back-and-forth discussions continuing over multiple editions. One of the most famous Feuilleton debates was the "Historikerstreit" (the historians dispute), about how the Holocaust should be seen in the context of German history.

Some of the Feuilleton texts are brilliant – think The New Yorker, but shorter and daily. This is the best of what newspapers can offer, and what online media like blogs are essentially doing, only without the advantages of top quality writing, research, and thinking that can be found in the best papers.

Old media clings to the outmoded concept of “news-papers” because they can’t imagine it any other way. The people who run old media continue to represent this idea unfailingly because that was the industry they learned to become newsmen in.

Even worse than how newspapers present themselves offline is the way they do it online. From a medium where the optimum usage of space once was a virtue, even the shortest article online is broken up into multiple pages, since all that counts on the internet are hits and clicks.

People might be willing to pay for online content, but no one has found a billing model that works. Micro-payment concepts for content have failed because they are too complicated. Subscriptions make billing easier, but there is no real added value when accessing a pay site: articles are not necessarily of higher quality, and payment does not save the reader from annoying ads or a terrible layout.

Newspapers must address these realities if they are going to remain competitive and relevant in the new media landscape. They need to worry less about breaking news first and more about giving it weight. They may have lost some of their importance to television and the internet, but much of their power remains, including their ability to shape the local, national, and international conversation.

Their true worth is in reducing the unimaginable vastness of reality into a few pages to be consumed and understood by everyone, and for this they remain invaluable.