Hard times in the newspaper business are forcing old foes to cooperate, a trend that will only increase in coming years, Dispatch Editor Ben Marrison told a local journalism group last night.
If you wondered, for example, why the Dispatch these days is using - and crediting - articles from the Cleveland Plain Dealer and six other Ohio newspapers so frequently in its columns, it's because the kind of cut-throat competition which has been an historic feature of journalism (think Front Page) is now being redefined in the face of cut-throat economics.
The Buckeye papers came together as the Ohio Newspaper Organization (ONO) to share copy and give members an alternative to the Associated Press in terms of statewide coverage, Marrison explained. AP remains a valuable news source, he said, but member newspapers were unhappy about several aspects of the relationship, including AP's rising subscription costs and the tendency of the news service to distribute newspaper stories without giving credit.
Some called the ONO "the Ohio revolution" and newspapers around the country began to consider such collaborative agreements as well. AP, Marrison said, has now responded to its member complaints but that doesn't mean the ONO idea has gone away.
"The ONO model is no fad," he told members of the Central Ohio Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, meeting at OSU's Fawcett Center. "It's real and it's here to stay."
Member newspapers are now considering collaboration in other areas as well, including printing and production, he said.
Although this is all still very speculative, Marrison said the possibilities include each newspaper supplementing its local coverage with feature sections published and distributed statewide.
These type of cooperative ventures do not eliminate competition, Marrison said, but they could reduce those instances where member newspapers all feel the need to staff and publish nearly identical stories on the same event. Instead, he suggested, the presence of a "pool" journalist or journalists at the scene of, let's say a prison riot or bridge collapse, could free up other publications to develop and exploit other angles to the story for the benefit of their readers.
And these are just a few of the many ideas newspaper executives are floating these days to put the industry back on a firm financial shore. Most, of course, involve news consumers agreeing to pay more for accurate, in-depth and well-edited information.
"If Americans want dime-store information, they'll get it," Marrison said. If what newspapers have provided is no longer what Americans are willing to pay for, the risk is they'll down-scale to "the quick, the easy and the cheap."
In closing, Marrison described the news-gathering business in terms many use these days for the overall economy.
"I believe newspapers will survive. They'll get smaller, but rebound, I believe, within two years."
(Gray Hunter)
