The End of Print Journalism

An old man yells at The Cloud.

Around the time I was promoted to editor-in-chief of one of America’s oldest newspapers, an executive wheeled a dumpster into the newsroom and told us to throw out the stacks of papers on our desks.

The top brass was dressing up the company for sale. They didn’t want prospective investors touring the office to see piles of newsprint. 

The corporate mantra was digital first. Focus on the website. Treat the “dead-tree edition,” as one of my bosses called it, as an afterthought. Now management had a bout of digital thirst. To attract a buyer, they wanted us to look like a sexy, young organization. Sure enough, they landed one. 

The paperless makeover continued after the sale. Bookcases that had held bound volumes of the paper going back a century were hauled away. Like the award plaques that stayed on the walls, the bound volumes had been a source of pride for the editorial staff, a reminder of our heritage.

On break once, I cracked open a musty volume from 1972, turned to the front page from the day I was born and spotted a familiar byline. I knew him from his brief return to our paper around 1999 or 2000, when I was a young section editor. The raspy-voiced curmudgeon had been in the racket longer than I’d been alive. 

Our heritage wasn’t digital. “Founded in 1836, older than The New York Times, older than the game of baseball” – to management’s minds, these were the last things to highlight when recruiting Millennial journalists or asking the company’s new owner for capital. You might as well write “over 50” on a dating app profile. The bound volumes got shipped to a warehouse.

Sad as I was to see them go, I, too, suffered from digital thirst. The company’s inevitable, overdue transformation couldn’t happen fast enough for me. 

I didn’t appreciate what the profession was losing or grasp the true price of moving online. It went well beyond paying for the web’s original sin of free content.

To be clear: I’m glad that the internet opened up legacy media to competition from new outlets and individual voices. This is not another "misinformation” scare piece. My lament has more to do with the form of digital media than its content or creators.

Tyranny of the ‘hed spec’

It’s a story you’ve heard before, with a B2B twist.

Online readership was growing while our print subscriptions stagnated – though tellingly, they weren’t shrinking. A stubborn cohort of the C-suite Boomers who paid close to $1,000 a year for our trade publication preferred the dead-tree edition. 

The Boomers would retire eventually. They weren’t the future. The future was digital.

Running the paper digital-first, not digital-only, was a pain in the ass. The print edition still required TLC. Someone had to decide which stories would start on page one, write photo captions, proofread pages headed to the printer. 

Continuing to do these things while jumping through new, then-unfamiliar hoops – “tweeting out” a story after publication, pitching influential bloggers in hopes they’d link to it, making sure the web headline contained high-value search terms – grew increasingly untenable. “I don’t have time to pee,” a fellow editor complained.

The idiosyncrasies of print, once bemusing, started to feel suffocating. Why should I have to trim or stretch a headline just to fill a certain number of lines of a certain width (the “hed spec”)? Why should I have to cut two lines from this story, or add three to that one, just to fit the page? It all seemed so arbitrary. 

When management decided to put the daily print edition out of its misery, I carried out the order gleefully. Not only would the obsolete grunt work go away, I thought, we’ll be unshackled from print’s pesky constraints.  

On the web, we can write what we want. 

I couldn’t hear the laughter emanating from Silicon Valley.

Out of the frying pan …

The website was paywalled. It never relied too much on traffic-driven ad revenue. After the company euthanized the print edition, we remained relatively insulated from pressure to make headlines shrill or clutter them with search terms. 

Not until I left the company for a digital media startup with no paywall did I understand how spoiled I had been. Only then did I see that the media industry had swapped what I once considered the rusty shackles of print for a gleaming new set of cuffs.

I probably don’t need to tell you why SEO sucks, how it forces headlines to prioritize hyper-specificity over craftsmanship. Just in case: Imagine pitching an all-time banger like “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” to an editor whose decisions revolve around what’s trending. “Who cares if he has a cold? I’ll salvage this by making it ‘Frank Sinatra Is Sick, But It’s Not COVID.’ You’re on thin ice, Talese.”

I certainly don’t need to tell you how the screaming match of social media has made it imperative for rivals in an “attention economy” to hyperventilate just to be heard over the din. 

But at the risk of sounding even more like Grandpa Simpson in the meme yelling at a cloud – or, rather, The Cloud – the media lost something else when we consigned print publications to a hipster hobby. Something subtler.

Dynamic range

To understand this other thing we lost, humor me and listen to Dark Side of the Moon. 

Notice how there are loud parts, and quiet parts, and parts that are in between. If you own a component stereo system, watch the equalizer levels. The LED bars probably fluctuate quite a bit throughout the album, even over the course of certain songs. Sound engineers call this dynamic range.

Next, turn on the radio. Find the local pop station. Whatever’s on the charts these days, chances are the levels are locked in a tight range. That’s audio compression. Everything is equally loud. 

Now, find a newspaper. Look at the placement of different stories. It’s obvious that the stories that start on page 1 are supposed to be more important than the ones that start on inside pages. The headline type will be larger for a world war ending than for a firefighter rescuing a cat from a tree. An exposé that took months to research will get more column inches than a quick write-up of a ballgame. 

A newspaper has dynamic range.

You might disagree with the editors’ judgment. You might think some stories got undeserved front-page billing while more important ones were buried. You may be right! Still, there’s no mistaking what the paper meant to play up, or down.

Everything is equally loud

In digital media, the “front page” is a website’s homepage. Correction: Was. 

In reality, few readers go straight to a homepage anymore. For most media consumers, the front page is a Twitter or Facebook feed or Google search. 

“Best practice” is to tweet every story you publish. On Twitter, the dynamic range of the print layout is gone. Every story is represented by 280 characters, tops, in the same typeface. All appear to have equal weight, whether or not a publication’s editors intended it. Everything is equally loud.

I noticed this range compression early on when the trade paper started adapting to the new digital landscape. A staple of our inside pages was the short, just-the-facts-ma'am story of a regulator taking an enforcement action against a small community bank. This was our equivalent of the rescued cat: A story worth telling, but no more than a few column inches. 

Now we had to tweet these stories. Simply because we did, it looked like we were making a big deal over them. A Twitter follower replied to one of these tweets with something to the effect of, “this is a tiny bank, not worth sensationalizing.” 

We weren’t sensationalizing! At least, we didn’t mean to. It probably came off that way because we announced this routine news item through the bullhorn of Twitter. 

In journalists’ minds, we’re speaking in a four voice, like Tom Brokaw. Twitter hears everything cranked to 10 like Alex Jones.

What choice does a digital media organization have? If you don’t tweet it, no one will see it.

There are crude ways to mitigate this range compression. You can put an all-caps kicker like “BREAKING” or “EXCLUSIVE” at the front of the tweet for a major scoop to accentuate its outsized importance. (This is best done sparingly.) You can pin that tweet to the top of the feed. You can make a thread. 

None of these tactics works as well as the visual clues of a print layout. For casual scrollers, the content just ends up fragmented anyway. 

Another casualty of this fragmentation is the concept of a “sidebar,” or companion piece to a longer article (the “main bar”). I realized this when a public relations representative sent a nasty email to one of my reporters. He had interviewed a top executive at the rep’s company about Topic A, and during the conversation snuck in a few questions about Topic B. 

The exec’s comments on the latter were included in a sidebar, which the rep saw online. Not realizing it was a sidebar, he accused the reporter of bait-and-switch – and apologized after we showed him there was also a main bar quoting the exec on Topic A. When the stories aren’t side-by-side on a newspaper or magazine page, it’s no longer obvious that one is meant to be read alongside the other. Hyperlinks are too subtle a clue for online readers. 

You could paint a panorama, and they’ll never see more than a puzzle piece at a time.

Constraint breeds creativity

Fun as it is to make nostalgic memes, there’s no going back. I don’t blame my former or current employers for playing the hands they’ve been dealt. Both still do great journalism. Nor do I know the solution to the problems described above (fear not, this isn’t a Web3 pitch). 

Yet maybe it’s too soon to be despondent.

Remember those newspaper hed specs I found stultifying? Actually, they were good. 

Online, “best practice” is to keep a headline inside 60 to 65 characters, including spaces. That’s not as much room as it sounds when you have to lard the title with keywords. Maybe it’s still too much room.

Constraint breeds creativity. In a funny way, constraint can aid expressiveness. Classic headlines like “Headless Body in Topless Bar” and “Ford to City: Drop Dead” could only have been written under the constraint of a tight hed spec. People remember those headlines today. No one remembers the Times’ versions (respectively, “Owner of a Bar Shot to Death; Suspect is Held” and “Ford, Castigating City, Asserts He’d Veto Fund Guarantee; Offers Bankruptcy Bill”). 

If Gotham’s tabloids could achieve prosody, maybe there’s hope for the digital form. Maybe social media’s range compression will somehow become another inspiring constraint. To invert a smug Twitter cliché, maybe someone will figure out how to say the quiet parts quietly again. 

Who knows? Maybe something good could come of SEO. (I’m not holding my breath.)

For now, pour one out for bound volumes of dead-tree editions. 

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Marc Hochstein, a.k.a Salty K. Pickles, is a writer in New York. Find him at Substack, Urbit (~fodrex-malmex), his day job or, if you must, Twitter.

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