Michael Kinsley, late of Slate, has a sobering yet generally upbeat analysis of the future of the news in today’s New York Times.
On the one hand, he does not see a scenario where most daily newspapers can survive by squeezing a few dollars a month in the form of micropayment from readers. Having tried the user-pays-something route at Slate, he holds this to be a nonstarter.
But he does see the survivors—several of the major news organizations, plus a few “local papers that execute their transfer to the Web so brilliantly that they will earn a national readership” or some “Web site [that] might mutate into a real Web newspaper” – as actually providing more choice for most readers than existed in the past when there were thousands of print newspapers. Furthermore, “Competition is growing as well among Web sites that think there is money to be made performing the local paper’s local functions. One or two of these will turn out to be right.”
The result, observes Kinsley, is that the “American newspaper industry will be more competitive than it was when there were hundreds.” This is a song a few of us have been singing for years. Soon we might have a chorus.
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