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At 15:52 on 29 Jul 98, Steve Outing  wrote in part:

> * Will it be as powerful a force in the community, or will its power erode?

Print readership is largely a factor of the extent of the reader's
ties to the community, more specifically the perceived extent 
of personal relevance of the community's activities to the reader's 
daily life.

Serious problems that metropolitan newspapers have faced with eroding
circulation and influence are largely attributable to the increasing 
diversity of metro areas, particularly to socio-economic gaps and 
both the transient nature of employment and the migration of affluent 
populations to suburban, exurban and edge communities. There is a 
growing sense among many that established community institutions, 
such as government, do not personally affect them. Newspapers, 
largely dedicated to the coverage of these institutions, thus become 
irrelevant as well.

As a result, I am very bearish on the prospects for metropolitan
newspapers, particularly those that do nothing other than cover
government, whether suburban or city. Smaller, community-based
newspaper remain strong.

The real questions are whether public, or civic, journalism can 
rekindle readers' perceptions of the significance of metropolitan 
institutions and whether virtual communities are broadly enough 
structured to sustain more targeted publications.

> * Will its audience become even older because the younger generation will 
>   rely more on new media?

This is one of three great myths of modern journalism. Readership 
skews old because community roots skew old. There is nothing inherent 
in youth that favors graphics, online or any other media form.

> * Will it become more TV-like in order to compete with other (including 
>   new) media -- in terms of shorter stories, less of the long,
>   investigative, interpretive stuff of which have been newspapers'
>   core strength?

This is the second of the myths. Most people never have read the 
long, thumbsucker pieces we always thought they did. They might have 
glanced at them, but that was about it. The big difference is that 
we only recently have been able to measure this. Go back and look at 
a 1930s front page, complete with deck after deck of headline, and 
think to yourself that nowadays we would call these entry points and 
say that they were needed because our audience had been dumbed down, 
lost its ability to pay attention for more than a few seconds or 
discounted the need to read. Ever since the press became a mass 
medium in the 1890s, we've been dealing with skimming phenomena. TV 
doesn't change the paradygm. It just gives readers another thing to 
skim.

> * Will it become more locally oriented, perhaps even reducing national/
>   international wire news because that's available in so many other
>   places?

Pro-forma national and international news will probably diminish, but 
there undoubtable will be an increase in selected national and 
international coverage that fits within the virtual community to 
which the readers predominantly involve. Local isn't important merely 
because it's local. Most suburban dwellers could case less about 
something going on in a distant corner of their suburb. 

> * Will the proliferation of media and convergence trends lead to a 
>   "dumbing down" of newspapers? Or will they remain above the fray,
>   holding onto a niche of being the one true "serious" medium?

Myth number three arrives. An example: The past two weeks, I've been 
giving my father and mother a vacation by editing their weekly 
newspaper for them. (No big deal, although the windows of the office 
did get shot out last night by an unhappy reader -- kind of unusual 
in a town where people don't lock their doors.) At any rate, during 
the two weeks, we switched the paper to full color -- one of those 
supposedly dumbing down things. The first person to call and tell us 
how nice it was was a leading attorney in town. The only person we 
found who hadn't really noticed was the village idiot.

Good journalism and good information design are all about efficiency, 
not about "dumbing down." Hasn't anyone ever heard the old saw about 
how it takes more effort to write something short than to write it 
long?

> * Will the print edition over time swap places with its online edition in 
>   stature -- the opposite of today, where online is a growing yet
>   still minuscule part of the total newspaper operation? Or perhaps
>   online and print editions become equal; the content is what
>   matters, and the delivery medium -- paper vs. pixels -- is
>   irrelevant?

Despite being something that we have all heard in one form or another 
since the 1940s, when facsimile was supposed to replace print, this 
is totally inconceivable. 

There are modality reasons; a printed paper is the perfect habitual
"push" medium. There are utility reasons; portability and instant
archiving (clippings) come immediately to mind. There also are
consumption reasons; people find it hard to read on computer screens
because the screen appears in the upper (scanning) field of vision
and it is much smaller than a broadsheet page, allowing for fewer
effortless choices.

But the key reasons are even more pragmatic: There's no indication 
from a demand point of view that this technology will ever reach an 
adoption point anywhere near the current market penetration level of 
print. Moreover, from a supply point of view, there is no economic 
incentive for the provision of bandwidth sufficient to overcome any 
of the previous obstacles.


              ERIC K. MEYER - meyer@newslink.org
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           managing partner - NewsLink Associates  
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    asst prof of journalism - University of Illinois
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