Bob Woodward came to Louisville last week and set aside a few minutes for the local press. He's no media theorist, but I expected someone with his experience and stature to have some interesting thoughts on the future of news media. I was disappointed. He (and a lot of people) can't seem to imagine a world where there isn't a newspaper in every city that supplies (or tries to supply) all news to all people in print or online.

In his latest blog post, Clay Shirky points out that newspapers are failing largely for the reason that they're newspapers, and the newspaper model doesn't make sense anymore.

Here’s what the newspaper business sounds like: the modestly talented son of the founder can generate double-digit margins based on little more than the happy accident that there are people who like football and buy cars living within 30 miles of his house.

That’s the newspaper business, or at least it was until recently. The average US paper runs more soft than hard news, uses more third-party content than anything created by their own staff, and reaches more people who care about local teams than local zoning. Telling the publishers of those papers to create a digital product so extraordinary that readers will pay full freight is a tacit admission that they do not know how to make such a product today.

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Buy a newspaper. Cut it up. Throw away the ads. Sort the remaining stories into piles. Now, describe the editorial logic holding those piles together.

If you’ve picked a general interest paper, this will be hard. I recently learned, from a single day’s paper, that a bombing in Kirkuk killed 27, that Penelope Cruz has only good memories of filming Pirates of the Caribbean while pregnant, that many U.S. business hotels are switching to ‘shower-only’ bathrooms, and that 30-year fixed mortgages fell from 4.63% to 4.61% the week before.

The rationale for creating such a bundle went something like this: “We will print enough content to fill the hole left after we’ve sold the advertising space. We will include content proportional to the amount and intensity of reader interest, modified somewhat by editorial judgment. Overall, the value of the bundle will be more than the sum of its parts.”

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Writing about the Dallas Cowboys in order to take money from Ford and give it to the guy on the City Desk never made much sense, but at least it worked. Online, though, the economic and technological rationale for bundling weakens—no monopoly over local advertising, no daily allotment of space to fill, no one-size-fits-all delivery system. Newspapers, as a sheaf of unrelated content glued together with ads, aren’t just being threatened with unprofitability, but incoherence.

There's been a string of articles recently arguing that the newsmedia landscape of the future will be a collection of small, specialized outlets with either specific points of view (like newspapers used to be) or full-on transparency (reporters' biographies include all possible conflicts of interest, political belief, etc). This puts the onus on the reader to seek out a full range of opinion or to vet reporters and decide whether the coverage is really fair (I'm a firm believer that even the most radically political person can right a fair and accurate news story). 

This is all fine, but every argument leaves out the people who can't afford the time or money to seek out multiple sources or read reporter bios with every story. Broadcast news is still popular with busy and low-income audiences, but commercial TV or radio news suffers from the opposite problem as newspapers. Rather than finding stories to put around advertisements, the news content is compressed to accommodate more commercials. At this point, there are plenty of great places to find news, but nothing equivalent to the penny newspapers. 

Whenever I think about this, I think about the publisher/futurist who came to lecture one of my senior year journalism classes. "Revolutions require unprivileged masses," he said. "The real internet revolution will happen when internet access is free or as close to free as it can be." He followed that up with a quote from Back to the Future. "Then you'll see some serious shit."  (That's the good kind of shit. Shit meaning stuff.)