As Starkman notes in his column, the fact that longer stories have declined at newspapers like the L.A. Times shouldn’t come as much of a surprise: Tribune Co., the owner of the Times, filed for bankruptcy several years ago and the chain has been struggling ever since (the Los Angeles paper and many of the company’s other assets are said to be for sale). The Washington Post, where CJR says longform stories were down by about 50 percent from 2003, and the New York Times — down by 25 percent, according to Starkman — have also been suffering from an industry-wide dropoff in ad revenue.

More resources on fewer stories isn’t necessarily bad

In that context, publishing fewer long stories seems like a fairly natural response to a shortage of income, and a need to print fewer pages on expensive newsprint. It’s also worth noting that the cash-strapped New York Times has actually published more stories that are 3,000 words and longer than it did in 2003 — 32 percent more, according to the CJR’s numbers. And the newspaper got some well-deserved acclaim for the way it handled the online version of one of those stories: namely, the Snowfall feature it released as an online series and an e-book late last year.

The Times‘ Snowfall feature helps to make one point that Starkman’s bleak assessment of the industry avoids, and that is the fact that longform journalism is evolving away from the traditional newspaper-based publishing that his numbers focus on. As the spokesman for the L.A. Times noted in a response to CJR, much of the paper’s feature coverage now includes video, graphics and other elements that wouldn’t have been present a decade ago — and don’t show up in a raw word count.

“In recent years, our longform storytelling has also typically incorporated unique videos and photo galleries. The two media – print and pixels – are seamlessly integrated in a way that a Factiva search can’t capture.”

As journalism professor Jeff Jarvis pointed out in a response to Starkman’s original post on Twitter, simple length is not a determinant of overall quality in newspaper features (and to be fair, the CJR writer admits as much in the first few paragraphs of his piece). In many cases, those longer features that were published a decade ago may have been overly generous — or indulged in only because they make good “award bait,” as one former newspaper colleague of mine described them.

Papers aren’t the only source of longform journalism

If newspapers like the Post, the Times and the Wall Street Journal are being more judicious with their use of space, and trying to devote the time and resources to fewer long pieces that provide more value, that’s arguably a good thing. And Starkman’s diagnosis also focuses (not surprisingly perhaps) on newspapers in a vacuum — essentially ignoring all of the innovation that is occurring in longform journalism outside that industry, through services like Byliner, Longreads and Atavist.

The magazine-style features that Byliner has become known for, or the longform pieces that readers share through Longreads may not replace the missing newspaper features one-for-one, but they are clearly filling a need. That need also becomes obvious when you look at some of the most-saved articles at “read it later” services like Pocket — many of them are long features from magazines and other outlets (although whether those who save such pieces ever get around to reading them is another question).

In other words, newspapers are playing on a much broader field than they used to. And all that competition makes it even more important that they focus their time and energy on features that can really come alive online, the way Snowfall did for the NYT — and if that means fewer words in fewer pieces, then perhaps that is for the best.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Jan Arief Purwanto, as well as the Columbia Journalism Review and Shutterstock / Ruggiero Scardigno

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Chittum makes it obvious where he believes the rhetorical goal-posts lie by opening with an anecdote about a Japanese soldier who was sent to the Philippines during World War II and told to “live on coconuts” if he had to. The CJR writer then compares paywall skeptics (including yours truly) to the Japanese army, and says their advice amounts to telling newspapers to live on coconuts. Later, Chittum says that their proposed treatment for the sick patient known as the newspaper industry is like recommending that doctors use incense and leeches instead of modern medicine.

Is this really the same as World War II?

The CJR writer also argues that members of the anti-paywall camp are “stuck in the mid-2000s, ignoring the events of the last few years,” as well as dismissing the innovative experiments conducted by newspapers like the Washington Post that don’t have paywalls. And he refers to various elements of the “catechism” that are the core beliefs of the “FONsters” or Future of News brigade — a group that includes author and journalism professor Jeff Jarvis as well as media theorist Clay Shirky, journalism professor Jay Rosen, and Digital First Media staffer Steve Buttry. Says Chittum:

The war is over. The evidence is in. Newspapers, large and small, premium and not, gain additional revenue through subscriptions and lose little if anything in digital ads. The Allies have won.

If nothing else, the strength of the rhetoric on both sides of this debate reinforces just how high the stakes are: the question of how newspapers and other traditional media outlets can (or should) pay their way in a predominantly digital age has gone from being a topic for light-hearted cocktail banter to a life-and-death issue for many companies. The market-leading New York Times is going through its fourth round of buyouts in five years, the Cleveland Plain Dealer is talking about a 30-percent cut in staff, billionaire Warren Buffett — as big a fan as newspapers have right now — is closing down titles, and some companies have gone bankrupt not just once but twice.

In that context, I can see why tempers might get a little heated. I spent some time recently with a senior digital executive at one of the largest newspapers in Canada and the frustration he felt was palpable: print advertising revenue continues to drop at a precipitous rate, digital ad revenue is not making up the difference, and mass layoffs are a painful thing at the best of times — especially when you know and admire all of those involved. So I am not unsympathetic to the CJR’s position, which seems to be that paywall critics are whistling past the graveyard.

Not should you charge, but whom — and for what?

As I’ve tried to explain, I am not against making people pay for things, including content — we charge people for plenty of content at GigaOM, including our proprietary research and our events. So I am in favor of charging readers: the big questions are which readers, and for what, and how. And I don’t think the answers are obvious.

Chittum and others assume that because I’m not a fan of blanket, one-size-fits-all paywalls around commodity news (for a number of reasons — both personal and professional — that I have outlined before) then I abhor any kind of paywall and wish newspapers would just give away all their content for free until they go down in flames. In other words, the only available options that are open for debate seem to be a blanket paywall or no subscription products at all.

But what about a membership model, the kind that some smaller sites such as Talking Points Memo or Pando Daily are experimenting with? This is something close to the “reverse paywall” or velvet-rope approach, where loyal readers are encouraged (and in some cases even volunteer) to pay for things. Do I have conclusive evidence that this could generate $100 million annually, the way the NYT paywall allegedly does? No, because no one has been doing it for long enough to prove that. But I will argue that it makes for a more rewarding relationship with your customers.

I don’t think anyone has a magic recipe that will return the newspaper industry to its former glory, for the simple reason that this is impossible. The news business has fundamentally changed, and returning to some mythical past is just not in the cards. Will charging people for the news help? It seems to have for some newspapers, although not for others. But that doesn’t mean we should give up looking for other solutions as well — and one of my main criticisms of media outlets with paywalls is that they seem to lose interest in pursuing other potential strategies.

What I would really like, however, is for everyone involved in this debate to be able to talk about the various options and alternatives without having the whole thing degenerate into a religious battle over who was wrong first, or who is more out of step with the times, or who resembles the Japanese Army in World War II. That doesn’t really help anyone, least of all the newspaper industry.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock/Nickola Che and Flickr users Zarko Drincic and Giuseppe Bognanni

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If you’ve been following the newspaper industry at all over the past year or so, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that 2009 was the worst year in decades as far as advertising revenues are concerned. But the sheer scale of the declines over the past few years is staggering. Last year saw a drop of 28 percent from 2008 –- and that year was already the worst for the industry since the Depression. Over the past four years, print advertising revenue has plummeted by more than 47 percent, to $24 billion from $47 billion. Online advertising has been growing (except for last year, when it shrank by 11 percent), but it still amounts to just 10 percent of what papers make from print. If you’re interested, the full numbers in all their gloom are available here.

According to the New York Times, the last time advertisers spent such a small amount on newspaper ads was in 1986. But Ryan Chittum at the Columbia Journalism Review notes that if you use inflation-adjusted dollars, the last time newspapers took in less in ad revenue was actually even further back — around the time John F. Kennedy died. Depressed yet? The head of the Newspaper Association of America, John Sturm, came out with this ray of sunshine in a response to Martin Langeveld at the Nieman Journalism Lab:

The velocity of the advertising decline for print classifieds continued to moderate, and adverse trends for national advertising and newspaper Web sites lessened considerably as last year came to a close.

While it’s great to hear that the velocity of the decline is moderating (remind me to tell that to someone the next time their parachute fails to open at around 10,000 feet), there are no signs that those figures are rebounding at all — and in fact, former newspaper executive Alan “Newsosaur” Mutter says that things could get even worse. Nor is there any indication that online advertising revenue is going to make up more than a thimbleful of that gap any time soon. If anything, online ad rates have been falling, at least for the kind of broad, mass-market reader that newspaper web sites cater to, because of the vast explosion of inventory from providers such as Demand Media and Associated Content.

So what are newspapers doing about it? Well, the main thing they seem to be doing is putting up walls. The Times of London said it will soon charge users for access to its web sites at the rate of 1 pound ($1.49) for a day and 2 pounds for a week under the mistaken impression that the way to determine the value of something is to put a price on it (the only way, of course, is to find someone willing to buy it). Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal is turning to new technologies such as the Apple iPad — but is taking a distinctly old-school approach to the new device, saying it’s planning to charge $17.99 a month for the newspaper on the iPad (this interesting fact appeared at the very bottom of a story in the Journal itself, quoting someone described as “a person familiar with the matter”).

So will this plan help turn the WSJ into a money machine? Possibly, although CJR contributor Ryan Chittum argues that the proposed pricing “doesn’t make sense.” As he explains:

A WSJ.com subscription costs less than half — $8.62 a week. A print subscription delivered to your door costs just $9.92 a month. A print and online subscription costs $11.66 a month. But you’re going to charge $18 for the iPad app?

So if the iPad isn’t going to rescue the traditional media, what does the future hold for newspapers? Although it’s still too early to tell whether it will succeed, a model based on what David Weinberger has called “small pieces, loosely joined” seems to be emerging, with third-party sites such as GlobalPost and Politico and others filling in the gaps left by newspapers. And former Washington Post executive editor Len Downie suggests that non-profits can also help. Or do newspaper companies need to “burn the boats” and focus entirely online, as Marc Andreessen suggested recently? (Note: Please don’t beat me up about how Cortes didn’t *actually* burn the boats — that’s irrelevant for the purposes of the metaphor). Perhaps we should we just wait for Russian billionaires to buy them all.

The reality is that most newspapers simply don’t appreciate how different the online world is when it comes to content. Too many are still laboring under the misapprehension that the Web is just like print, except without all the tree-killing — you put your content on there just like it was in the paper version (except maybe you add a link or two, or a video clip) and readers line up to read it, and you go home. There are a few exceptions, of course, such as The Guardian — but even it has been struggling for profitability, weighed down by its legacy print operations. Too few mainstream media outlets realize that despite their similarities, the world of digital content is completely different from the world of print publishing, and needs to be thought of and treated differently. And walls don’t help.

For a great overview of the issues confronting traditional media in a digital world, check out this video of Clay Shirky speaking at Harvard’s Kennedy School last year, in a talk sponsored by the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics, and Public Policy:

And the Poynter Insitute has a clever (and depressing) interactive timeline that tracks all the newspaper industry layoff notices going back to 2007:

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Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Zarko Drincic