Let's print an organic, artisanal newspaper

This semester, I am taking a course called Experimental Publishing.  One of the mantras in that class is this: you don’t need to reach 3 million people. You need to reach the right 30,000 people.

If you aren’t going to be the next Facebook, Apple, or Amazon, you have to find a niche. And that’s something many different companies and organizations are doing, particularly when it comes to different types of media.  Vinyl record sales have been the only area of the music industry actually growing over the past several years.  Now, there is talk of a comeback for cassette tapes.  Kodak is releasing a new Super 8 camera for the first time in 34 years.  These aren’t industries that are high or even mid volume. But they have dedicated customers who want to spend money on them.

Our readings this week suggest  that millennials prefer reading physical things and view digital news as inherently lesser than dead tree news.  So my question is, why can’t the resurgence of old-school, antique/boutique media give newspapers a boost?

It really sounds like something millennials would get behind – tactile, large-format, visually appealing news that serves (as vinyl, super 8 film, fixed-wheeled bicycles do) as part luxury good, part social signifier. Get it funded on Kickstarter. Print it on artisanal paper. Biking to your independent organic coffee store and pulling out a newspaper should be trendy as hell.

I think there are several reasons why this hasn’t happened.  First, as the Brookings Institute piece pointed out, newsrooms are complex.  Truly groundbreaking news is usually produced by a team drawing from years of experience. That’s hard to create from scratch on a shoestring budget.  Second, the “right 30,000 people” are hardly ever in the same place, or even the same hemisphere.  Local news would be out, and covering anything but the most broadly important issues would be difficult.  And finally, as Dr. Chyi said in her interview, the end of traditional media is kind of a self-fulfilling prophesy.  Even though most of us prefer to read physical copies of the news, we also believe that print publishing is doomed. It’s hard to overcome that inertia.

But if anyone thinks they can solve these problems, hey. Let’s start a paper.

(P.S. I have a browser extension that replaces (among other things) the word “millennial” with the word “snake person,” and the word “digital native” with the word “parseltongue.” That made this week’s readings extremely hilarious.)