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Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get ReviewDoctor writes this book from an elitist perspective, without ever telling the reader and, given his own journalistic background in places such as Eugene, Ore.; Boulder, Colo.; and St. Paul, Minn., perhaps without even realizing it. First, Chapter 1 is written as if every American is frantically searching the Web for the highest quality journalism about everything, all of the time. But while one-third (say, 33%) of the U.S. public uses Google every day, in a typical day less than 1% of the U.S. public is reading, on paper and online combined, The New York Times. The same goes for readership of each of The Dallas Morning News, the Chicago Tribune, The Economist, The Guardian, or viewership of CNN, BBC, News Hour with Jim Lehrer, or Rachel Maddow, and virtually all newspapers, magazines, TV shows, and radio programs that Doctor implies "everyone" is now consuming because of the Web. The fact is that The New York Times was widely available nationally on paper both before and after it was available on the Web, and the Times never was able to get even its Sunday on-paper circulation over 1.5 million in a country of roughly 300 million people despite supposedly everyone wanting to read it. All of Chapter One is written based on a claim, an assumption, that Americans want the highest quality journalism, but he provides NO evidence anywhere in the chapter that this is true for more than a small fraction of the public. It is not until page 81, in fact, that Doctor finally admits that most news consumers settle for "good enough content" (which is true now and always has been). But his recognition of John Q. Public settling for "good enough content" is in direct conflict with his Chapter 1, in which all of us are our own editor, frantically searching the Web all the time for the most excellent journalism.
For a former newspaper editor, he leaves out numerous pieces of context that would show that the U.S. newspaper industry is not quite as incompetent, broke, etc., as it might seem. For instance, on page 10 and elsewhere, he mentions paid circulation figures only for on-paper editions and how quickly they are dropping; he leaves out that many metro dailies total readerships (print and online) have increased dramatically because online readership growth exceeds print readership decline. He also leaves out context for news media that show limited reach; for instance, on page 14, Doctor writes that half of all Americans watch a news video at least once a month. First, such self-reports always exaggerate real numbers. But even if accurate, that means that only 5 million Americans (out of nearly 310 million) watch a news video (such Katie Courac with Sarah Palin, see p. 20) each day which, when divided by the number of news videos available, is not very many per video on average, and is not impressive in total number or percentage of the U.S. population. (Again: a tiny percentage of the U.S. population ever has seen the "gotcha" Palin interview, either live or on the Web.) Likewise, he reports that one-quarter of Americans reads a blog at least once a week. Even if these self-reports (claims) are true, that is a little more than 10 million persons doing it each day, which is only slightly more than 3% of the U.S. population: a large number, a tiny percentage.
"For a former newspaper editor...." (continued): On p. 54, he takes 12 minutes a month on "local newspaper" (see below) websites as evidence that they have bad websites or other news organizations have better ones, but Doctor doesn't point out that local news on local newspapers' websites is not competing against state, national, or international news on other websites. The obvious conclusion is that in suburbs and small cities and even smaller towns all over America, people still want to read their local newspaper PRINTED ON PAPER. On p. 47, he vaguely concedes, "smaller city newspapers are faring a bit better" than regional or metro daily newspapers. Unfortunately, Doctor deemphasizes (to put it mildly) this rather key point, and omits entirely that more than 90% of all U.S. daily newspapers in the United States, as well as more than 90% of all U.S. weekly newspapers, are "smaller city newspapers." On p. 75, he claims that the Internet "began to affect their [newspapers] business in the 1990s," but this has been disproven in fine studies; U.S. newspapers began reacting to the Internet in the 1990s, but the Internet had virtually no impact on newspaper readership until 2003. (This was true for newspaper advertising, too, as Craigslist was still in only 18 cities by the end of 2002.) On p. 85, he writes, "Why has all this money moved [from newspapers] to online?" without a shred of evidence that anything other that much classified advertising has moved from newspapers (as opposed to other media or being new ad dollars) to online. Also on p. 85, he writes, "The Web just works better for so many advertisers than traditional media," again without provided a shred of evidence that is true for anything other than classifieds (cars, dating/sex, real estate, jobs, housing, Google listings ads, etc.).
To full grasp how the U.S. newspaper industry is structured (which Doctor never bothers to tell you, either because he doesn't know himself or because it would get in the way of the narrative he has constructed in his head and wants to pass to you), I refer you to: [..]/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_the_United_States_by_circulation.
There, you may note that newspapers #1, #2, #3, #5, and #63 are national newspapers.
Almost all of the others in this top 100 list are or might be called metro dailies, except most of the ones from 89 to 100. The 1,300 U.S. dailies that are NOT on this Wikipedia list are ALL small-to-medium-sized newspapers. Doctor talks about the entire U.S. newspaper industry while, based on his book, seeming to know or care little to nothing about any daily newspaper except the largest 34 of them (St. Paul Pioneer Press [where, not coincidentally, he was managing editor] and larger) out of 1,400.
In fact, Doctor never defines, and therefore can never keep straight, what is a "regional" newspaper and what is a "local" newspaper. On p. 24, he says they both "shrink rapidly." On p. 45, he refers to the metro daily Minneapolis Star-Tribune as a "local" newspaper, and on p. 46, he says that seven "local" newspapers are in bankruptcy while referring to the following metro dailies: Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News, and others. (Nor does he tell you that they were all put into bankruptcy by overleveraged buyout deals combined with the recession, and not put there by the Internet generally, the "Dirty Dozen" or any other external force.) On p 53, he refers to the Gannett Company as if it consists of nothing but "large dailies," but Gannett Co. owns 82 dailies: one national paper (USA TODAY), 10 metro dailies (Phoenix, Detroit, Indianapolis, Louisville, Cincinnati, Nashville, Rochester, Des Moines, Honolulu, and Wilmington), and 71 medium-to-SMALL sized dailies. Bottom line: Gannett, far from being all large dailies, consists overwhelming of NOT large dailies. And Doctor is dead wrong when he says on page 6 that "every city" has or had "hundreds of journalists." (The typical U.S. daily, which has a circulation of less than 13,000, has a news/editorial staff of about 15 journalists, not "hundreds.")
On page 16, Doctor provides the wrong lesson regarding The New York Herald Tribune and the weekly Life magazine, saying that they died because they did not "excel." In reality, they were both superb, but the Herald Tribune (the quality of which nearly matched, and sometimes exceeded, The New York Times) folded because of a massive union strike that hit all New York City dailies, while Life magazine's advertisers mostly left for network TV while its readers still loved it (it was closed in December 1972, despite a January 1972 rate base of 5+ million circulation!). HINT: Is this what is happening to daily newspapers? Readers drifting away slowly while advertisers leave too quickly? On p. 29, when he makes his point about top journalistic achievement coupled with poor financial performance, he doesn't point out that one can find prominent examples of this in media over hundreds of years! But then Doctor obviously is no historian, journalism or other.
On page 18 and several other places in the book, Doctor never answers the question of whether the average news consumer, or whether anyone, wants or needs the 4,000 news sources on Yahoo! or Google. (Not the least of which reason is this: based on what he tells repeatedly, there are not 4,000 different news organizations doing their own reporting on anything, even Pres. Obama or the Iraq War; only wars get 400, most U.S. national political news can barely scrape together 40 news organizations, so virtually all of the content in 4,000 news organizations is duplicative. Doctor never tells you that either.)
But perhaps the strangest Doctor error or omission in the book is that he almost always leaves out the Great Recession (the largest economic collapse in world history since the Great Depression of the 1930s), which started during Fourth Quarter 2007 and ended during Third Quarter 2009, with a very weak recovery since except Fourth Quarter 2009. On p. 2, he notes drop in U.S. newspaper advertising revenues in 2009, but doesn't mention the Great Recession. Doctor makes the same omission in writing on p. 77 about both revenue figures and the acquisitions of the Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and Chicago newspapers, and on p. 78 on why no one would buy a newspaper the last 2½ years. On p. 85, for the very first time, he finally admits it was a "deep recession." But after having repeatedly told the reader what happened to newspaper advertising revenues the last several...Read more›
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