Media: Hard to Call it the Tricycle Herald

KENNEWICK, WASHINGTON - I have an interesting relationship with the Tri-City Herald newspaper. It was the first newspaper to ever publish my picture in 1986--which was nice, except for the fact that the word "geeks" appeared in a headline immediately above my head. It was pretty hard to avoid the conclusion that the editors had decided I was a geek.

When I actually lived in this area for a summer in 1996, the Tri-City Herald was my daily paper, as it was for everyone else that rode our bus to work, and we talked about what was in it on a regular basis. Our bus driver regularly referred to it as "the Tricycle Herald" which just seemed the perfect moniker for a newspaper that felt less substantive than the stuffy big-city papers from the New York Times to the Spokane Spokesman-Review.

Fast forward more than a decade and a very different picture appears. The Tri-City Herald hasn't changed much. It still runs thorough stories on the local community, and in the Internet era has even become a national source on topics of elevated interest locally, such as nuclear waste storage (because of the local Hanford Nuclear Reservation) and the sport of unlimited hydroplane racing (because of the annual race held the last weekend of July). Furthermore, it runs a healthy dose of opinion and news stories from other McClatchy chain papers (the Herald was acquired by McClatchy in 1979) and gives substantial space to local letters to the editor.

In contrast, most bigger-city papers are badly struggling and many are mere shells of their former selves, with radically fewer employees and pages of printed matter available each day. The Tri-City Herald no longer seems like a borderline-juvenile operation, but compares favorably to newspapers serving much larger areas. The big city papers--those that still exist, anyway--are usually little larger than the Tri-City Herald and don't seem to have much more content.

So why is the Herald faring better than other papers? I presume the fact that the area is growing in population (not much over 100,000 in 1996 to more than 225,000 today) doesn't hurt, but I suspect it's a comparative lack of alternatives--Internet sites like Yelp are not as commonplace in Tri-Cities. In fact, in casual conversation, it seemed that the most popular web site with local information was the Tri-City Herald's. Likely, as the area grows, other sites will move in and the Herald will come under a similar stress to that faced in larger cities.

This outlook underscores that not all is well with the Tri-City Herald as it is under the same pressures to reduce costs and staff as other McClatchy chain papers. At least one staffer left to become a political spokesperson fearing layoffs. Still, in the current media landscape, I don't feel comfortable dismissing it as the "Tricycle Herald" anymore.

Media: The Free Daily's Impact

TORONTO, ONTARIO - A visitor from the Boston area recently noticed that the free weekday "Metro" paper he found on the subway here in Toronto looked exactly like the "Metro" distributed in Boston. There's good reason for this reaction. As a quick perusal of Metro's worldwide website reveals, similar such papers the world over are all related through at least partial ownership by Luxembourg-based Metro International. Everywhere it is published, Metro seeks to provide a very basic summary of the news of the day that one can read completely during an average public transit commute, supported exclusively by advertising.

When I first moved to Boston, the most common newspaper seen during the subway section of my commute was likely the Boston Globe, with the Boston Herald not far behind and the New York Times and Wall Street Journal also often noted. (In the brief period when I subscribed to the International Herald-Tribune, I was a real oddball.) After the introduction of Metro in 2001, that quickly changed, and the free Metro paper soon became the dominant paper seen in the subway, well ahead of the Globe and the Herald.

Granted, Metro itself only publishes in three United States markets (New York, Boston and Philadelphia), and only a handful of additional cities have a similar product from another company (and the public transit infrastructure where such a paper makes sense). Yet, the impact of these papers seemed so obvious in Boston, where the Globe's very existence is now threatened, that it is surprising that the trend hasn't seemed to have gotten much attention in the current hand-wringing over the future of newspapers.

Turning all the daily papers into smaller, advertising-supported papers that can be read on a public transit commute or work break time obviously does not represent a way to save today's newspapers. It does nothing to solve the problem of how to fund investigative journalism. However, just because what may be learned from the success of Metro International is not obvious (at least to me) does not mean that it should not be thoroughly explored, which it does not yet seem to have been.

Media: More on the Future of Journalism

TORONTO, ONTARIO - Earlier this month, the Project for Excellence in Journalism released its annual state of the media analysis, including a section on newspapers. Considering that this report amounts to some of the best minds in the industry trying to chart out a future, it's pretty sobering that the suggestions for the future of newspapers as summarized in a Christian Science Monitor article don't seem to hold much promise--and I mean that even in terms of news organizations, not just physical newspapers.

The first idea is one I have advocated for both newspapers and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation--creating non-profit foundations, like ProPublica, to produce high-quality news. However, they point out that it is unlikely that there is enough funding to become a general ownership model. It's hard to argue with that assertion, though maybe it can save a few newspaper organizations as they turn into general journalism organizations.

The other ideas? Adopt the cable model, in which a fee to news producers is built into monthly Internet-access fees consumers already pay. I like this one, but I see only one way to administer it--as a tax. That will never fly in the United States, so unless someone figures out a better way to administer that idea, I'm afraid an idea that makes a lot of sense will be stillborn.

Next, build online retail malls within news sites to create a local search network for small businesses and link them directly with customers. I like this one as well, but I don't see how if the current advertising-supported methods are failing that this one will bring enough additional revenue to work, either.

Third, develop subscription-based niche products for elite professional audiences, which have already proved to be a profitable growth area in journalism. Clearly, this may work for some publications, but it's hardly a recipe for providing general news.

Finally, collaborate to challenge aggregators, especially Google, to start sharing more revenue. I don't see this happening. There are too many options for news collection (say, Al Jazeera for national news in the United States, which as a reminder is government-funded) for there for be any incentive for the aggregator to do this--and some have said as much.

Interestingly, my other standing idea, an official fourth estate funded by government is not listed as an option for newspaper organizations, which may say more about the mind-set of the United States than it does about the actual practicality of the idea. Indeed, it seems to be so far removed from what is considered acceptable in the United States that it isn't even worth mentioning and rejecting. Considering the lack of other options, I am reaching the conclusion that this must change and the idea must be taken seriously.

Media: The Rural-Urban Divide

TORONTO, ONTARIO - The more I talk to friends that have some knowledge of the media, the more convinced I am that I will have to give in about having a physical newspaper to carry around, even once a week. Besides the capital and operating costs of operating a printing press, and the transportation costs of distribution, all of which are dooming the physical newspaper, there's an environmental aspect to it--even using recycled paper, it's not ecologically responsible to use that much energy and paper to create a hard copy of the newspaper.

Fine, I give in. I will miss the physical newspaper, but I can tote my laptop around if a e-Book device doesn't satisfy me, and I will be able to read the electronic version of a newspaper. That's okay for someone living in a place like Toronto, where it seems like free WiFi internet informally covers the whole city (except exactly where one wants it at a given time)--at the very least, a hot spot to go and download the latest news is never that far away. With time, that will probably only get better, as cellular phone networks and wireless broadband Internet become even more integrated.

However, how does that help someone in, say, White River, Ontario? In a community of just several thousand people dozens or more kilometers from the next closest town, how does someone there get the latest newspaper? In theory, the Internet was going to make it irrelevant where someone was located--a person could be reading a web page from across the same room as the content creator or from the South Pole. In a world of streaming media and large file sizes, though, that only works if the South Pole has a broadband Internet connection.

If we don't want to leave rural residents behind, we need to take more seriously the development and deployment of technologies that bring data--whether it's being delivered by the TCP/IP protocols that dominate the Internet right now or any other future data transmission protocols--to rural locations. Rural residents are used to waiting to get news because of their remote locations, but with the Internet, it's either there instantly or it isn't ever there. Perhaps they won't have quite the bandwidth available in a huge metropolitan area (that may be the cost of being rural), but if there's a free (or low-cost utility-style) network available in the cities, it needs to be available wherever people are living, at least if it's a place that justifies electricity delivery. Internet access needs to be a utility, treated like electricity. It's becoming that essential to living in the modern world.

While the replacement of newspapers may have pushed me over the edge to such advocacy, it runs much deeper. If future workplaces will require being able to use technologies currently available on mobile devices, then rural children will be at a severe disadvantage to learn the skills necessary to contribute to that workplace if they can't use such devices. It might seem like it would be nice if children from outside the cities didn't text message all the time, but it might mean that they wouldn't know how to sell products when they grew up.

The technologies developed for rural areas may benefit cities as well--they likely will be able to be deployed in less dense suburbs as well as the countryside. As this is clearly a technical challenge--at least from the standpoint of accomplishing at a reasonable cost--it will inevitably advance the technology, likely providing performance gains for us all.

Canada, as a nation that is substantially rural outside of the Windsor-Quebec corridor, faces a potentially larger urban-rural divide than most countries if it cannot bring broadband to its rural residents. I have constantly complained about the lack of vision in government policies of both Liberal and Conservative governments in recent years. Here's a chance for such vision: Provide government incentives for the development and deployment of rural broadband. It will pay off in terms of a level playing field for all citizens, and it would give Canadian companies a chance to sell that technology to the rest of the world, where it will also be needed.

And, it will let us all read the newspaper at the same time, when the newspaper on newsprint is gone.