PRINCETON -- Peter R. Kann admits to a “lifelong love affair with newspapers,” but doesn’t shrink from acknowledging the contributions they have played in their own distress.
Addressing a 55PLUS gathering at the Jewish Center of Princeton Thursday, the former Dow Jones chairman said that publishers have managed to trap their papers and their websites into “a totally illogical business proposition.”
When newspapers began adapting to the Internet in the mid-1990s, Mr. Kann said, most major publishers were swayed by the argument all content offered there should be free of charge. Newspaper business models based on that argument “assumed there would be some enormous flow of Internet advertising that would pay for everything,” he said. “And that clearly has not happened.”
The flawed business strategy contributed to the current depressed state of newspapers, Mr. Kann said. ”It devalued the primary publishing asset, which is news,” he said. “It accelerated the decline of print circulations and of more profitable print advertising. It left the unprofitable Internet editions almost entirely dependent on their news flows from shrinking print staffs and basically left the publishers juggling these two twin products — the old ones in inexorable decline and the new ones in a form of commercial denial.”
Fifteen years into the era of free newspapers on the Internet, the flawed business model is the subject of furious discussion throughout the industry. The Wall Street Journal, which Mr. Kann once headed as editor and publisher, remains the most notable exception with more than a million paid subscribers to its online edition.
But it will require considerable nerve for most newspapers to make such a transition now, he said.
”Publishers are going to kind of have to pick their poison, which is to say, die slowly or take the risk of charging online and perhaps live on in this new form,” he said.
Mr. Kann did not place all of the industry’s woes at its own feet, however. He also addressed the role of technology and demographics, the latter hitting home with the 55PLUS audience. The organization is a non-sectarian group that promotes social contacts for people who are either retired or have flexible working hours.
Noting his own four children “all grew up in a home with two parents who were journalists,” he said, “and yet none of them these days regularly reads a newspaper, not in print and not even in a very regular way online. And you extend that across many millions of families, and, not surprisingly, newspapers around the country are shrinking in size and . . . circulation.”
The current generation, Mr. Kann said, “has actually grown up without the ingrained habit of reading newspapers but also, I’m afraid, with less recognition of what is news. I mean they are bombarded with a constant and confusing cascade of information and opinions and entertainment . . . They expect instant everything from fast foods to instant messaging to anything or everything in real time, 24/7. And they expect an almost limitless array of choices . . . Not surprisingly, this rather old-fashioned concept of a newspaper really is not for them.”
Yet, without the content from newspapers, Mr. Kann said, neither the Internet nor TV has demonstrated the capability of providing “flows of accurate and honest and trustworthy information . . . essential to the functioning of a free society or a democracy.”
Indeed, the digital capability to zero in on specific information is the antithesis of what Mr. Kann called “the serendipity of newspapers — which is to say that they tell me things I did not know I wanted to know.”
He said, “I like the fact that newspapers employ, train and count on reporters to go out and cover and uncover news. I like the fact that they have editors with some level of experience and judgment to kind of sift and sort and guide me as a reader to the most important developments. I like the organization of newspapers, including a format that separates, albeit not always perfectly, news from opinion.”
Mr. Kann expressed a less generous view of opinion-based blogs — “they may produce gossip at times, but they aren’t producing news” — and of the right/left cable competitors at Fox News and MSNBC — “talking heads yelling opinions at each other . . . political actors masquerading as journalists.”
But the retired reporter and Princeton resident, who won a 1972 Pulitzer Prize for overseas reporting, sees hope for the survival of serious news coverage in the students he teaches at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
”These are remarkably bright and engaged and idealistic young people, who are still being attracted to journalism even though the job prospects for them are much gloomier than when I began in this career,” Mr. Kann said. “I expect it is going to be these kids who are going to be able to create some new media models.”
ftuccillo@centraljersey.com 
