Saving print journalism

    "The last two journalists in America sat at a card table in the middle of their empty newsroom. They faced each other, about to flip a coin," John Kelly wrote in a column earlier this month in The Washington Post. "The coin was to decide which one would be the second-to-last journalist in America and which one would be the last journalist in America."
    As Kelly's journalists, living in what some see as the quickly approaching journalistic apocalypse, quietly lay down their typewriters and surrender their tape recorders, they realize that not all is lost. The flow of information, after all, has not dried up, and news consumers are turning in increasing numbers to online sources.
    Still, they feel some lingering despair; they feel forgotten as they realize that nobody will be around to tell their story. Technology has supplanted them, and they see themselves as being left far behind on the information superhighway. Will anybody remember them in 20 years?
    Fortunately, Kelly's nightmare situation is still in the realm of fiction. But the storm clouds are still gathering in a very real way, and the first casualties have already gone to the wayside.
    The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, for example, closed its doors earlier this month after losing $14 million last year; now, it will only publish online. Meanwhile, other papers all across the country are laying off writers and cutting back on their exclusive coverage.
    And college newspapers are hardly immune. The daily college newspaper is a creature ever lingering on the verge of extinction, as reduced ad income and rising printing costs have forced some difficult decisions. As they try to keep their papers afloat, student journalists at Syracuse University, New York University and Boston University have decided to cut one print edition per week, and it's hard to predict what the next sacrifice will be.
    Maybe this process is not only inevitable, but also natural, perhaps even beneficial. Praise abounds for blogs and online sources, and some have gone so far as to announce the birth of an information revolution and the start of a democratization of the news.
    Even so, something still feels wrong. We at Tufts are hardly old enough to pass for curmudgeons clinging to the need for physical interaction with the news, the inexplicable desire to touch a paper and flip through its pages. But hopefully, we are also not yet blind enough to lose our sense of perspective. Newspapers, after all, are the standard bearers in a rich tradition.
    For centuries, print publications have set and redefined the ground rules for the flow of information worldwide. Print journalists have created ethical norms, broken the biggest stories of our time and pushed their counterparts in other media to follow their lead.
    Some would say it's time for print journalists to pass the flag, to surrender their ground. But what then?
    A single medium, in this case online, is fundamentally incapable of meeting the diverse demands of readers in the international community. Print may be dying, but we should not start burying it just yet.
    We at the Daily are not blind to the economic realities that constrain the growth of newspapers. But a little innovation is not too much to ask for, not when the consequences are so dire.
    Papers across the country need to rebrand themselves, but that does not mean they need to abandon their missions. Here, the Daily is lucky. We have a niche readership that we don't foresee disappearing.
    You, our readers, are a captive audience living in an insulated community, and while you might not pay us for our services, your demographic profile is attractive to advertisers. Other papers, too, have untapped resources; they will undoubtedly need to scale back, but some fresh thoughts can at the very least forestall their demise.
    After all, the Internet does not exist in a vacuum. Even as papers encourage their print readers to visit their online versions, they should also try to give their Internet readers a reason to buy a hard copy.
    Ultimately, flipping a coin in some distant newsroom may be one way to bring about the demise of print journalism. But why hurry? At least at the Daily, we prefer survival.