Following up on an earlier post about cause-and-effect of the newspapers’ decline, I wanted say that I realized only recently just how emotions cloud this discussion.

In particular, it’s very difficult to discuss the death of newspapers with the many many people who are emotionally-connected to them as a medium and who are convinced (in some cases rightly) that a lot of in-depth investigative journalism may suffer – if even temporarily – as a result of the death of this business. But more than that, these are people who spent years if not decades waking up and reading their papers in the morning. I still count myself one of those people – I read two papers before I leave the apartment every morning (okay, I skim big chunks of them).

So, for example, in the course of a discussion I had this weekend I mentioned to one person that, at the end of the day, newspapers have no one to blame but themselves for their decline. The reaction I got was pretty strong. Either it’s all the Internet’s fault or the economy’s fault – but the degree to which some people fail to acknowledge that newspapers AS A BUSINESS have just been poorly run is pretty striking.

At the end of the day, there are a confluence of many many factors: corporate consolidation, debt mismanagement, the failure to invest in R&D, the failure to figure out the Internet with well over a decade grace period given to work it out. But there’s something about these things that make it difficult for so many to rationally examine the causes. It’s too emotional a subject, and that blocks coherent analysis and discussion around their downfall. Blaming newspaper execs for mismanagement, for example, isn’t the same as saying “I hate newspapers and think they’re worthless.” But that’s how it sounds to the ears of some listeners.

And that’s one key reason why this particular media debate has stirred up passions to the degree that it has.

A quick word about my friend Al Giordano’s post about the death of newspapers. Giordano was certainly prescient in his move to Internet journalism many years ago (additionally, Giordano’s work is supported by public fundraising but is not reliant on advertising), so he’s earned the right to crow.

However, I don’t think his analysis as to WHY newspapers are in decline is exactly right, and I think he mixes two different (albeit important) arguments:

I grew up reading a New York Times that no longer exists: Tom Wicker reporting from the Attica prison truthfully and in solidarity with the rebelling inmates, Max Frankel ordering expensive investigations into government wrongdoing, the publication of The Pentagon Papers leaked by Daniel Ellsberg, and I’ll never regret following music critic John Rockwell down Bleeker Street to The Bowery and through those graffiti-covered doors into the future that we inhabit today.

As one who, last year, finally weaned myself off the New York Times Crossword Puzzle – the last section of the Gray Lady that held my attention – I understand that old habits and routines die hard, and that my crocodile tears for the putrid newspaper industry are not well received by all. There is something familiar and comfortable – like warm apple pie – in opening one’s door in the morning and staining one’s fingers with ink. There was a time when reading the local daily made us feel part of something bigger than ourselves: a community, a city, or a metropolitan area. Newspapers used to be the glue that held communities together. Not so much any more.

The first point is that the work of the journalists just isn’t what it used to be and the pure quality of work is in decline. That’s a difficult notion to dispute, although I wouldn’t call myself qualified enough to provide an overview of journalistic quality over the last few decades.

The second point is that newspapers no longer hold the same place in our community that they did in the past. I think that is also certainly true. Take New York city. It used to be you needed to read the NYTimes to stay up on current news, particularly local community news. With millions of commuters choosing between their 2 or 3 free newspapers at subway entrances, not to mention a proliferation of hundreds of other sources online and off, there’s no question that this town isn’t as connected to the Times as it once was.

But can we definitively attribute the reason WHY newspapers don’t hold the same place in our community to the decline in journalism quality? I think that’s a bit of cause-and-effect reasoning, and probably not the only example we can find of someone finding a particular aspect of decline in news journalism and declaring that the reason for the decline of print media (to be fair, Giordano doesn’t declare that the sole reason, but hints strongly at it).

I believe these are all important pieces to analyze, but we should be careful to break out the different factors and assign them their individual importance relevant to ALL the countless reasons newspapers are on the precipice. I’m not disputing the decline in quality, I’m just not convinced that’s really the driving factor behind the decline. Someone conduct a scientific study!

This morning I caught this “Morning Joe” segment about this very subject – which got into a sort of interesting discussion around online advertising as a business model between Arianna Huffington and Peggy Noonan. Arianna, who can sometimes be insufferable, but is actually making the attempt to push the envelope when it comes to online investigative journalism, tried her best. But dealing with the incredibly condescending know-it-all tone of Peggy Noonan is difficult.

What is most infuriating about Noonan’s statements are the degree to which she dismisses online advertising and touts the great benefit of offline advertising, and frames that as if it’s ESTABLISHED FACT. Only it’s not. She was speaking for herself (which she basically admits at one point), but used grandiose framing to make it sound like this is the WAY IT IS. Well, online ads have their problems. But they have plenty of success stories too (search and video to just name a couple) and sites such as Huffington Post actually do a decent business based on online ads.

Certainly, overreliance on advertising as a model isn’t a good idea for sites that hope to built profitable, enduring futures, but the dismissal of it by Luddites like Noonan on national TV is even more ridiculous.

Good overview from the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism. I’m still working through the complete report (which apparently tops out at 700 pages), so for now I’ll just focus on some of the major trends they identify:

The growing public debate over how to finance the news industry may well be focusing on the wrong remedies while other ideas go largely unexplored.

Forget about micropayments and changing to non-profit status. And forget about a single revenue source being the magic bullet that will save the news business. Most likely, it will take a combination of new ideas, including “online retail malls” and “subscription-based niche products for elite professional audiences.” That last point is an important one; while it’s nearly impossible to get an audience to start paying for a service they’ve been receiving for free, there are always opportunities to upsell premium offerings to segments of your audience.

Power is shifting to the individual journalist and away, by degrees, from journalistic institutions.

This sounds like a good thing for journalists, but as Spider-man would say, with greater power comes greater responsibility; specifically, the responsibilities journalists used to depend on organizations to take care of such as editing, marketing and publicity.

On the Web, news organizations are focusing somewhat less on bringing audiences in and more on pushing content out.

This is another trend that’s potentially liberating, but also scary. When publishers bring users to their content, they also control the options for monetizing it. Even if they are able to place ads in RSS feeds, for example, it’s a completely different type of ad from the one they’re used to selling. And RSS ads are at least quantifiable; even scarier are all the things that can’t be measured. What’s the exact value of providing readers with the information they want at the time and place they want it? It’s impossible to know, but there’s a good chance that it’s greater than the cost of not providing those services.

The rest of the report includes special reports on citizen-based media and new ventures, a survey of online journalists and in-depth studies of a number of media verticals, including newspapers, online, television and magazines. Definitely worth checking out the whole thing.