The fading print (updated)

As it does every year the Philippine Press Institute, the national organization of newspapers, will meet in a general assembly from the 23rd to the 25th, this time to take up what would seem a curious concern:

Media accountability and public engagement.

One might ask: How could the newspapers have managed to make those two things a problem for themselves, given the very nature of their enterprise? How can they help, every time they publish, not engaging the public and not putting themselves as well under its audit?

In fact, they did manage it. And if they have now realized that, one can only hope they have done so before it’s too late.

The pre-eminent medium for the longest time, such that no piece of news or opinion gained full legitimacy and currency until sanctified in it, the newspapers seem to me to have become so smug as to presume pre-eminence some preordained permanent place for them.Which is, of course, not the case, a fact long-enough unmistakable if only they have been looking with the professional quality they’ve always claimed to possess—objectivity. In this case, conspicuously and possibly fatally, that precise quality happens to be absent.

There’s simply no denying, as stark as they are, the radical changes in the media environment, changes brought on chiefly by technology and increasing working against the newspapers. The newspapers do acknowledge them, but only to a convenient extent—that is, again, to the extent that their place in the hierarchy of media is preserved—if only in their minds.

Fairly clear-eyed to the virtues of technology for their own purposes, they’re not at all averse to using the most modern communication devices and facilities (all manner of computers, the Internet). But they seem blind to the inexorable encroachments on their territory, also thanks to technology, by other media. They don’t seem to notice, for one thing, that more and more readers are taking to the screen and fewer and fewer to paper—not to mention that there’s less and less pulp available for producing paper.

The numbers tell the tale: television, favored by technology itself and able somehow to adapt to the new consumer habits it has created, has cornered 77-78 percent of the advertising money, and radio, suitable especially to an increasingly mobile society as well as to the archipelago’s island dwellers, has bounced back taking 17-18 percent; that leaves a mere 5 percent for the print media, not just the newspapers, to fight over.
Foolhardily, newspapers hold on for dear life to the hope that the numbers may yet reverse themselves, even as cold reason demonstrates that any changes in prospect are not likely to favor them, perhaps not even television or radio, but the online media.

Few businesses in cyberspace (definitely not in our parts), let alone media businesses, are actually making money—although where it’s made in some cases it is made big apparently, but theirs is the sort of enterprise well positioned to grab the market favors coming in the fast-arriving future.

The newspapers would seem, on the other hand, poorly positioned, imprisoned as they are in tradition, unable to kick their now unprofitable habits, fading with their market. And with no public to engage and account to, what reason is there for being? What reason is there, indeed, for all this—newspapers coming together to deal with an issue being rendered irrelevant by their own undoing?

In fact, it can all be made timely and relevant if only they come open-eyed and open-minded enough to change with change. With all the weaponry and wisdom they have collected through their long and useful years, how can they not have their own competitive advantage today or at any other time?

Never will news become an irrelevant product, or journalism an irrelevant skill. Print may fade but not, in their professional sense, newspapers.

Continued next week: “Changing with change“