The Solomon Scandals A Washington newspaper novel by David Rothman

The trash factor: A big reason why newspapers are in trouble? And how can they cope with it?

Despite the dark humor in my Wash­ing­ton news­pa­per novel, The Solomon Scan­dals is also an exer­cise in nostalgia—taking us back to the oft-glamorous hey­day of big dailies. Why are news­pa­pers strug­gling today, by con­trast? No small rea­son is The Trash Fac­tor, which I’ll get to. That’s trash as in trash room, not trash as in tabloid.

Quick! How much time do you spend brows­ing through your local paper—and I mean pulped wood—com­pared to the past? Me? I cut out my Wash­ing­ton Post sub­scrip­tion many months ago and get the Post online on my iPod Touch instead; or at least I try to deal with the less-than-stellar pre­sen­ta­tion of the news there. I nor­mally don’t want to read about the Red­skins or high fash­ion or zil­lions of other things with which the paper Post fills itself to please the mainest-stream, if you’ll for­give the neologism.

Stuffed and proud of it

When I was sub­scrib­ing to the Post, one of the exec­u­tives proudly said, as I recall, that he liked the heft of the paper. Alas, the reces­sion is tak­ing care of that obtuseness—making his sen­ti­ments increas­ingly irrel­e­vant. But even on an enforced diet today, the Post would stack up just partly read at my place, given all the must-read new sites and blogs online.

So ear­lier, in the inter­est of ecol­ogy and san­i­ta­tion and my wife’s wor­ries about her pos­si­ble allergy to newsprint, I can­celed my sub­scrip­tion. I’d much rather have sup­ported a local news­pa­per. But in terms of pack­ag­ing, the Post has more or less been blind to my needs. The sim­ple, no-frills mobile New York Times—simple not in its excel­lent con­tent but in ease of browsing—is my major source of news today, via my iPod Touch. I don’t have to haul “used” elec­trons to the trash room.

Cop­ing with the Trash Factor

No, this isn’t a dia­tribe against the actual sto­ries in the Post or its mis­sion. For exam­ple, I’m com­pletely sold on L Street’s belief that there are cer­tain things, such as hav­ing an Iraq bureau, that large news orga­ni­za­tions can gen­er­ally do much bet­ter than blog­gers. I’ve wit­nessed big gov­ern­ment close up, have inves­ti­gated it, have seen what a has­sle inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ism can be, and just can’t imag­ine soci­ety rely­ing on inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ists alone, regard­less of the many things they can do well.

So what would I rec­om­mend for the Post and other big dailies to win back peo­ple like me?

1. Let peo­ple choose between sub­scrib­ing to the cur­rent Post and a highly slimmed-down ver­sion with quick news sum­maries and short Web addresses where they could go for more details. The rein­vented Post would have more zoned edi­tions than the cur­rent one does—and many news items every­day about, say, Alexan­dria, VA, where I live. May the day come soon when pulped wood edi­tions can even be per­fectly tai­lored for indi­vid­ual sub­scribers. That day isn’t here yet. What I’ve described would be a nice tran­si­tion, if noth­ing else, and cut newsprint costs.

2. Stop pre­tend­ing that the cur­rent mobile Post is a video game or elec­tronic slot machine. Sim­plify the inter­face and make it as easy to nav­i­gate as the New York Times’ edi­tion for the iPhone and the like. Also make the mobile pre­sen­ta­tion more com­pre­hen­sive, so I don’t have to go back to the main paper site, which the iPod doesn’t digest that eas­ily despite a good browser for its size of screen. Yes, I could read the Post on my desk­top com­puter. But I spend enough time in front of the usual screen. What’s more, I enjoy the instant-on fea­ture of the iPod. I’m a boomer, but among young peo­ple, the peo­ple most likely to have for­saken the Post, or have not tried it out in the first place, mobile prob­a­bly counts even more.

3. Ulti­mately team up with the Asso­ci­ated Press or oth­ers to work out a bet­ter inter­face. News­pa­pers should pool resources rather than con­stantly try­ing to do tech­ni­cal tasks best left to oth­ers; and beyond that, some stan­dard­iza­tion could make it eas­ier to digest the news and help news­pa­pers bet­ter com­pete with Google. Brand­ing could still occur through restrained use of graph­ics. By the way, the best sin­gle mobile inter­faces today are very likely within mobile iPhone apps from AP Mobile News and USA Today’s. Why isn’t L Street pay­ing more atten­tion? Is online pre­sen­ta­tion too pro­saic an issue for the Post brass to worry about?

4. For siz­zle, yes, go for YouTube style videos, well-integrated with sto­ries, and think about hand­ing out Flip cam­eras and oth­er­wise exper­i­ment­ing with mul­ti­me­dia cit­i­zens jour­nal­ism, as the New York Times appar­ently will be doing. I don’t see cit­i­zens jour­nal­ism as a panacea. But it has its place to aug­ment cov­er­age from pros at the local level, where breadth of cov­er­age is more impor­tant than com­pletely flaw­less copy, which even the pros can­not achieve. Pay the cit­i­zen jour­nal­ists at least a token amount. Just as impor­tantly, give them ample train­ing to do the job right—a goal of the New York Times’ exper­i­ment with hyper­local news cov­er­age. The Post, by the way, has also been into hyper­local; but in the past some have said it isn’t “hyper” enough in that regard.

5. Don’t try so hard to steer me via RSS to the mobile-hostile PDF edi­tion. Maybe the Post has improved in that respect since I last checked.

6. Either put all of the back archives online for free or for a rea­son­able price. Talk about ways to bind read­ers to the Post! I can’t even look up obits with­out the Post nickel-and-diming me. If the Post wants peo­ple to regard it as a local insti­tu­tion, then it needs to behave that way. Yes, I’d be will­ing to pay mod­er­ately for spe­cial fea­tures, but never as much as I did for the paper Post—those days are gone, as well they should be, given the lower costs of E.

7. Work harder than ever to peg adver­tis­ing to neigh­bor­hoods and to the con­tents of archived stories.

8. Think about more inter­ac­tiv­ity no only within news­pa­pers but also through alliances with and use of Net sites such as Twit­ter, Face­book and YouTube—potential feed­ers, as well as places for coöper­a­tive adver­tis­ing arrangements.

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