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It's no secret that the internet has exerted a transformative influence on almost every aspect of popular culture in the 21^st century. It has changed the way music is sold and distributed, altered the way television is viewed, and made the piracy of mainstream movies a popular pastime. These industries, which all initially tried to fight the encroachment of the internet, learned through sheer financial attrition that resistance truly was futile. Eventually, each enacted a range of compensatory strategies in an effort to work with, rather than against, the internet, and their fortunes improved accordingly. The final frontier, so to speak, in the internet's assault on the way people access popular culture is the printed word. The internet has already undermined the primacy of paper in the creation and dissemination of news and will, in the not-so-distant future, eliminate it entirely. However, the twist is that unlike the film, television, and music industries, whose conflict with the internet was an exercise in survival, the newspaper may emerge as a stronger and more viable entity.

That the newspaper will use the internet's influence as an opportunity to evolve, rather than merely survive, is far from certain. What is certain is that the outcome is one to which we should all be paying attention. While the public was understandably indifferent to the cries of financial anguish the internet extracted from record companies, television executives, and film studios, the future of the newspaper merits attention. Whereas movies, television shows, and popular music serve popular taste, newspapers serve the public interest. Newspapers are an important, even essential, element of a vibrant democratic culture. Thomas Jefferson, who is rightly regarded not just as one of the founding fathers of American democracy but of democracy itself, observed that "were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."

More pragmatically, as Dr. Henry Milner observed in a 2001 paper published by the Institute on Research and Public Policy examining the linkages between media literacy and democratic participation, "individuals who read newspapers, in Canada as elsewhere, are politically more knowledgeable," and "the most important single aspect of maintaining media literacy is regular newspaper reading." The social benefits of newspaper consumption are highlighted in a survey conducted by youth-oriented think-tank D-Code for the Canadian Newspaper Association. In it, researchers noted that while 78% of respondents who identified themselves as regular readers voted in the last federal election, only 56% of infrequent readers bothered to cast a ballot. Regular readers are also more likely to participate in other forms of democratic activity, be it forward emails on issues of concern, joining a political party, or partaking in public protests. Newspapers are, then, an important contributor to the health of our democracy both now and in the future. Ironically, while the internet has severely disrupted the previously prospering cultural industries of music, film, and television, it might save one that was otherwise doomed.

While the precise figures vary from source to source, a 10% decline in newspaper circulation between 1990 and 2002 is a conservative assumption, and it includes the torrent of free newspapers that have been dumped on the public in recent years. The bottom lines of Canadian newspapers haven't fared any better, as the past decade has witnessed a relentless onslaught of mergers, layoffs, and downsizings, all in an effort to blunt the effect of a rapidly shrinking number of subscribers.

Newspapers began their decline, both in terms of their standing in the hierarchy of authority in popular culture and their readership levels, long before Al Gore invented the internet. While circulation figures only starting dropping in absolute terms in the early 1990s, in real terms the decline began at least twenty years earlier. While circulation figures rose incrementally until the early 1990s, those increases were outstripped by a factor of magnitude by the rise in the population purchasing those newspapers, effectively masking their decline. In reality, we're more than fifty years removed from the newspaper's Golden Age, when the average household consumed more than one newspaper each, per day. By 1990, that figure - "household penetration" is the industry term - had dropped by more than half.

For a time, it appeared inevitable that the internet would deliver the final blow to this already faltering industry. Already faced with break-even balance sheets, publishers now had to deal with the potentially ruinous influence that the internet promised to exert on advertising revenues. While newspapers found ways to deal with the gentle long-term decline in subscriber rates and the resulting decrease in revenues generated by display advertising, they had no such solution to the influence the internet exerted on classified advertising revenues. Classifieds, which constituted a more substantial portion of any newspaper's overall revenues than display ads, were utterly and almost instantly decimated by websites like Craigslist that offer far more detailed classified advertising for free.

The internet's influence certainly wasn't limited to advertising, though. Content wise, the internet provided easy access to important information like stock prices, weather forecasts, sports scores, and movie listings, items that were traditionally accessed only in newspapers. The proliferation of online pundits and news sites threatened the monopoly on authority and opinion making that newspapers previously enjoyed. These threats are only exacerbated by the way in which young Canadians access news information. Overwhelmingly, young Canadians are turning to online sources for their news needs, with far fewer sticking with the traditional printed version. According to the Newspaper Audience Databank, only 45 per cent of 18- to 34-year-old Canadians currently read a newspaper every day, compared to 63 per cent in 1986. Yet, as journalist John Naughton noted in the November 12, 2006 edition of The Observer, newspapers have yet to respond appropriately. According to Naughton, "in any other industry, the discovery that your potential future customers weren't interested in buying your product would prompt an investigation into whether there was something wrong with the product. But what one hears - still - from the newspaper industry is that there's something wrong with the customers."

But the problem wasn't the customers, but instead the newspaper industry's ineffective response to their changing patterns of behaviour. Instead of embracing the opportunities presented both by the internet and the evolving habits of their readership, journalists, publishers, and owners dug in. As the Toronto Star's media critic Antonia Zerbisias observed - fittingly, on her blog - "there is still much resistance to e-journalism in these here parts. Too many journos feel we're giving away content for free and jeopardizing our long term viability in the process. There's a sense that it's hurting our single copy/newsstand sales." Any changes that were made were limited to the margins, such as the introduction of boutique blogs and the reproduction of printed content online. The intent was not to use the internet to any detectable advantage but rather to merely satisfy the barest of technological minimums.

Instead of using their ample resources to exploit the opportunities presented by the internet in order to recapture their younger readers, they flooded the market with free pseudo-papers like DOSE, helmed by young Noah Godfrey and staffed by an equally young team of writers, in the misguided belief that by attracting young readers to these new vehicles they'd also be creating future readers for the "mother" papers. The failure of this strategy, which resulted in the thousands of glittering red DOSE boxes being repossessed in the middle of the night last summer, was both symbolic and instructive. The industry has yet to fully recover from the deployment of this deeply conservative strategy, one that didn't suit a technological environment in which success is determined by the ability to lead change, not follow it.

At long last, however, it appears that those responsible for the newspaper's future understand that it depends far more on news than paper. The New York Times, the most respected newspaper in the world, has already stated its intention to move completely online in as little as five years. According to publisher, owner, and chairman Arthur Sulzberger, "I really don't care whether we'll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don't care either." While Sulzberger's enthusiasm isn't necessarily shared by Canadian publishers yet, they still face the same mandatory transition from paper to pixels as Sulzberger and their ability to negotiate it will determine their long term success and failure.

If they're wise, they will, like Sulzberger, view the internet as an opportunity upon which to act rather than a challenge to be managed. The biggest drag on a given newspaper's profitability has always been the paper itself and everything that goes into printing, processing, and distributing a physical copy of a newspaper. Freed of the previously inescapable inefficiencies of paper, newspapers will be able to redirect a significant portion of their budget towards content. This, and not free papers like DOSE, youth-oriented columns and columnists, or flashy USA Today-style graphical treatments, is the future of the newspaper.

That future looks bright for the first time in a long time. While the internet has eliminated the monopoly that newspapers previously enjoyed on the formation and expression of leading opinions, it has in no way diminished the demand for those opinions. If anything, the growing cacophony of voices on the internet, be they in the form of blogs, newsgroups, social networking tools, or other as yet unseen incarnations of internet technology, will create a premium for the intellectual harmony that newspapers have, and still can, provide. As The New York Times's Sulzberger observes, "we are curators, curators of news. People don't click onto the New York Times to read blogs. They want reliable news that they can trust." That trust factor, properly cultivated, may make properly expressed opinions and accurate news reportage more valuable than they have ever been before.

Similarly, freedom from the press - the printing press, that is - should end the decades-old trend of newspapers cutting editorial staff, be it local beat reporters, foreign desks, or opinion columnists. With the emphasis on delivering content instead of copies, newspapers intent on competing will have no choice but to increase the range of voices, the depth of their contributions, and the frequency of their filings. Likewise, digitally located content will not be constrained by the limitations of broadsheet paper, allowing for longer pieces, more in-depth reportage, and a general increase in the quality, and quantity, of news coverage.

Perhaps most importantly, the internet will provide journalists with tools that could, if properly exercised, allow them to improve the quality of their work. The most powerful among these new tools is the internet's capacity for interactivity, one that promises to significantly reduce the distance between author and audience. From interactive commentary sections to email feedback and regular online chats, the internet allows readers to actively engage the news and those who report it, rather than passively absorbing it as they have in the past. Similarly, the internet allows journalists to reference a much wider range of external material than the printed newspaper allows. From related documents and source materials to sound and video clips, the internet allows journalists to create more textured and effectively referenced material. The internet presents a remarkable opportunity for journalists, both to improve the quality of both their work and their relationship with their readership.

If the vitality of a democracy depends on the quality of its publicly available and accessible information, then the internet may prove to be the most important development in democracy's relatively short history since the extension of the voting franchise. While people have been turning away from newspapers over the past thirty-five years and young people seemed poised to leave them behind entirely, the internet has provided an important and entirely unexpected opportunity, both for the reinvention of its form and a revitalization of its influence.

Toronto, July 16, 2007 - 1,992 w.

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