Towards a paperless newspaper

Executives of Guardian News and Media in the United Kingdom have spent the past few days furiously denying reports that the group, which publishes the Guardian and Observer newspapers, is about to ditch its print editions and publish entirely online.

The reports, by Katherine Rushton, the highly respected media, telecoms and technology editor of the rival Daily Telegraph, indicated the move was the most dramatic of a series of desperation measures to halt the steady flow of annual losses by the group, which currently stand at around $69 million.

In response, senior figures at the Guardian have said that while digital-only newspapers are in the group’s distant future, print would remain the foundation of the organisation for many years to come.

That rather sums up the dilemma that newspapers are finding themselves in around the world, and especially in Australia where Fairfax is courting death by a thousand cuts.  Circulations and advertising revenue have been steadily shrinking and the initial response – slashing resources and jobs – is doing nothing to reverse the trend.

A string of British regional newspapers (including the one I trained on, the Express and Echo at Exeter) are dipping their feet in the digital water. Former dailies, they have become weeklies with their journalists breaking stories 24/7 online and the weekly print edition serving as a synopsis of the news for the dwindling band of readers who still want to have it in their hands.

Properly managed, this is probably the way to go, but in Australia most of the newspaper world is still in denial. Worse still, the growing reliance on ‘citizen journalism’ as a way of cutting costs is eating in to the only advantage newspapers still have – news, features and comment that can be relied upon because of the expertise and professionalism of the people who produce it.

To return to the British example, Rushton highlighted this trend in an article earlier in the year. She quoted Guardian executive Adam Freeman telling a conference that newspapers should move towards an “open vision for journalism, relying on lay people who may not have any formal expertise, as a key to the future”.

“Experts because they care about the subject matter as much as we do - they don’t have to be called ‘professor’,” Freeman said.

For that read giving the fanatics, the crazies, the compulsive letter writers, in fact anyone with an opinion on anything, however unfounded and out of left field, freedom to pontificate in the news columns and on the websites.

If anything is designed to kill off newspapers – and probably destroy journalism as a profession – it is giving untrained egotists and zealots equal status with men and women who have studied, trained and done the hard yards to be able to call themselves journalists. This will be putting media outlets on the same page as anyone with a computer and a compulsion to publish their words to all who care to read them.

Instead of throwing their long-standing, highly-competent and respected staff on the scrap heap, managers could do well to nurture them as the key to the survival of newspapers in the digital age.