Paul Farhi is advocating for newspapers to kill themselves.
I read, for the first time something written by Paul Farhi, media critic for The Washington Post. It was a piece for the American Journalism Review that said newspapers need to focus on printing newspapers and give up on the Web. This is the kind of short-sighted that is killing today’s newspapers.
Farhi is pitching a short-term solution to a long-term problem. Newspapers haven’t figured out a way to make money on the Web, so they should just quit and go back to focusing on the declining revenue of the print product.
True, there are few newspapers in the country that have been able to hold their own revenue-wise on the Web. Farhi makes great points that newspapers have not, as an industry, found a good way to do business on the Web. Newspapers give away their content. Their Web ads are too cheap. They are siphoning readers from the print product.
But the reason papers do the Web so poorly is because industry “leadership” has discounted the medium’s importance. Publishers and executives took a “mañana, mañana, mañana” attitude and woke up one morning to find its balance sheets bleeding red ink forcing it to make ridiculous cuts to save costs. Why not invest in ways to save your industry?
Farhi’s thinking is indicative of the mindset that put newspapers here in the first place. Unfortunately, he never addresses what newspapers will do when its most loyal (and aged) subscribers die. He does, near the end of the article, talk about the need for newspapers to provide unique and compelling content if they are to survive. But that should have been his first argument.
Farhi also acts like newspapers are the only ones that can provide news on the Web. His premise is that if newspapers give up and focus on print, people will have no choice but to start subscribing again. Why do newspapers have the lock on journalism? I won’t even bring up The Huffington Post or (gag) The Drudge Report. But imagining that newspapers are the only ones that can do what newspapers do is arrogance of the highest order. Let’s not forget all the journalists that were cut loose by those cost-saving newspapers. They did not turn in their skills with their employee IDs.
What’s really ironic is that I read this 2,852-word in the medium he’s asking newspapers to abandon. Did he really even consider what he was writing and where he was putting it?
UPDATE: Apparently I’m not the only one who thinks Farhi is full of beans.
