COLLES ANGLAIS

TEXTE 11

What will outlast newspaper? Jim Rutenberg International New York Times One day many decades hence, when your grandchildren ask you, “Grandma, what was a newspaper?” you can direct them back to Tuesday, Sept, 6, 2016. Because it may well go down as the day the American newspaper as we’ve known it moved out of intensive care and into the palliative wing on its way to the Great Beyond. The Newspaper Association of America, the trade group that has represented the interests of major newspaper publishers in one form or another since 1887, is going to drop from its name the very word that defined it: “Newspaper.” The group will be known as the News Media Alliance. There is one obvious reason behind the change: The number of newspapers continues to drop, which has a way of depressing the association’s membership. (It has fallen to about 2,000 from roughly 2,700 in 2008, executives there say.) But the bigger issue, the group’s chief executive, David Chavern, told me last week, was that the word “newspaper” has become meaningless in reference to many of the group’s members, including The Washington Post, The New York Times and Dow Jones. They may have newspapers, but they get larger percentages of their readers online. Actually, you can’t even refer exclusively to “readers” these days, when so many millions are “viewers” of online news video. Then there are all those digital news organizations that until now could not join the association because they did not have print editions – like BuzzFeed or the Independent Journal Review. (Independent Journal Review is among the first members that does not publish a newspaper.) The print requirement was needlessly exclusive for a group that needs all the members it can get to meet numerous existential challenges – such as ad blocking, ad fraud and aggregators who steal their material and then use it to compete with them. “‘Newspaper’ is not a big enough word to describe the industry anymore,” Mr. Chavern said. “the future of the industry is much broader.” [...] [A]s the ad dollars that have long financed journalism vaporize into the electronic ether, you don’t know with any certainty that the best services that newspapers have provided – holding public officials to account, rooting out corruption – will live on. If anything, today’s “efficiencies” may even set readers back by pumping out lowest-common-denominator non-sense or at worst, disinformation. Today’s industry thinking goes that the modern newspaper – er, news company formerly known as a newspaper – can [...] maintain its public service mission while also providing higher-traffic bits that “pop” online. But it will most likely have to do so with fewer resources and a smaller classically trained reporting staff. That means letting some stories go uncovered, which at best can mean skipping stories about nonlethal fires in pursuit of the bigger fish – and at worst can mean eliminating the full-time City Hall reporter. Know-nothing press haters may say that news organizations are going out of business because the public is shunning them, but that’s not the case at all. Through online exposure, newspapers are reaching more people than ever. The problem is how to make money. Circulation for physical newspapers is declining, and so is the print advertising; digital ads remain far less profitable. The trick is finding a way to make up the lost revenue. That’s one reason that physical newspapers have stuck around as long as they have. “I don’t think there’s anyone in the industry whose majority revenue is not still print,” said Michael J. Klingensmith, the publisher and chief executive of The Star Tribune of Minneapolis, and the vice chairman of the soon-to-be News Media Alliance. He added, “The name change to me isn’t about not being paper anymore – it’s really just about expanding opportunities.” That leads back to where this column started. The newspaper, as we’ve always known it, is dying. There will be a lot less to mourn, and even something to celebrate, if we come to find that it has an everlasting soul that lives on. 676 words