Publish or Perish

A newspaper cannot sustain itself if no one receives it, so many papers have turned to on-line publishing, creating a situation where no one needs the paper if it’s available on-line. The questions are many, including how to ask consumers to pay for a product they already receive free, as well as can a paper survive in a virtual world? There are no easy answers and, perhaps, no real answers, but some ideas have been swirling around my brain.

First, there is a kinesthetic connection to reading: the process of holding, touching the pages, and turning them are integral to the reading process. When students are directed to "open the book to page whatever," the kinesthetic relationship begins. Students often add to the kinesthetic process with margin notes, underlining, highlighting, bending and folding pages. My textbooks also are indexed with bright tabs that provide a quick reference for finding what I need when I need it. On-line classes are challenging on so many levels, one of which is the necessity of on-line resources that include not just the course materials, but the required auxiliary readings. The new hand-held electronic readers may be fine for pleasure reading, but for the lasting kind of comprehension that develops during coursework, in preparation for a court case, in some research and development businesses, the materials must be readily available and in the hands of the reader. For some of us, the only way to read, comprehend, and make meaning of the materials is to print it, hold it in our hands, and mark it up. Those students who rely solely on virtual documents do not have the same level of retention as those who hold the materials and interact kinesthetically with them.

Another aspect of the reading process that is often over-looked online is the go back: the first time through even a sentence can be confusing, so the reader often naturally goes back, rereads, and then continues. Part of the go-back process is thumbing through the pages to find the specific content, the kinesthia of which often serves as a memory aid. Going back at the time and on the page is an easy option, but going back online to a specific URL to reread is often more difficult than the rewards of the effort to do so. What many readers develop is surface reading skills, reading and retaining just enough key information to present a vague overview, but not retaining enough deep details to speak knowledgeably—sort of the “there is guy who shot another guy and … .” Gross generalities are seldom sufficient in many areas of our lives that need to know who, when, what, where, why and how.

What, perhaps, needs refocusing exists on the financial plane of publication: too many workers earn too much money to fill the pages needed to justify the expensive printing process, and there is limited ad revenue to pay for the process and the people. In the good times, we bloat our businesses with “wouldn’t it be great to have someone who could” employees. In my field, education, it’s the aide syndrome; every time there is a little bit of wiggle room, we add another office worker, playground supervisor, tech assistant, custodian, groundskeeper, employees whose union is far stronger than the teacher’s union and whose jobs are far more tenaciously secure than non-tenured teachers. They may be the last in, but often those aide workers are the hardest to let go. In publishing, good reporters earn higher salaries, so they are let go long before the office workers who type the copy, who answer the phones, who keep the building open. No one wants to take a voluntary pay cut as it takes so long to climb to the top of the professional pile, but one of the realities of a poorly-performing economy is that too many people are being paid too much money to do a job that may not be worth what the employee earns. For every employee earning $50,000 in annual salary there has to be revenue source, which means the cost of the goods/services has to be increased to match salary increases and publication costs. There are some finite limits to how much people can afford to pay for a newspaper, a magazine, a colorful advertising brochure.

The obvious solution to part of the problem is to cut personnel and cut production: fewer people put out a smaller paper. However, the cost ratio remains intact: it really does take so many people to publish a product, and some of the costs are fixed. While employees can work together to improve efficiency, as well as effectiveness of the product, and may accept a cut in pay in the process, it still is going to cost what it costs to publish the publication, fixed costs that can be circumvented by online publishing. However, who is going to pay for the costs associated with the staff required to research, report, write, and publish the newspaper online? Readers who are receiving the newspaper free are not suddenly going to rise up and demand that they be billed for the privilege: we are, after all, only human. Not many people are going to write for free, but yes, it is possible to pay less salary for online correspondents if the publisher realizes and accepts that the quality of the content will suffer as a result. Journalism is a legitimate profession; blogger is an individual indulgence.

An auto-charge to an established account every time a user logs on is fair, perhaps a dollar; however, if an individual wants to post reactions to the news, in effect becoming an online correspondent, the fee should be higher—perhaps $20. Not only would this keep narcissists and blowhards from flooding online newspapers with inane, inflammatory, and/or inappropriate commentary, but people who have something to say would take the time to say it well because it is no longer “free” speech. I would pay a monthly maintenance fee of $20 to maintain my blog because it’s an important outlet for my “free” thinking, often thoughts and ideas for which I have no other outlet. Phone companies charge for texting and twittering, so the mindset exists that electronic input comes with a price and can be associated to online publishing as well.

The paradigm has already shifted, but we’re still talking about how we’ve always done it, which is one of my pet peeves, especially during the early years of my career when I railed about doing the same event every year based on the flimsy “it’s a tradition” reasoning. As people change, their lives change, and society changes to encompass those changes. It’s not whether I agree with it, but whether I can accept the changes that matter. Publishers who keep their companies chained to the same business plan they adopted milestone years ago will perish if they refuse to study the habits of the consumers and tailor the product toward those habits. Maybe we all need to go back into the garage with an old mimeograph machine and hand-crank the neighborhood newsletters again to see where we have gone wrong and the direction we need to be heading.