Bodo Finance konec letošnjega leta še izhajale v tiskani obliki? Bodo Primorske novice še samostojne in plačljive ali zgolj brezplačna priloga katerega (?) drugega dnevnika? Bo Žurnal 24 še obstajal? Bomo res dobili še en dnevni brezplačnik, kot to po ukinitvi tiskane izdaje Indirekta napovedujejo v Media Projektu in Regionalnih medijih? Lahko Delo do konca leta zdrži z enako veliko novinarsko ekipo ter enakim številom potiskanih strani časopisa in prilog? Koliko downsizinga si na račun kakovosti ter zaradi (pre)plačanih nakupov,  zgrešenih projektov in ‘izletov’ zunaj osnovne dejavnosti še lahko privošči Dnevnik? V čigavi lasti bo konec leta Večer in koliko bo še ostalo od njega? Koliko dnevnikov v tiskani obliki, plačljivih in brezplačnih skupaj, bo Slovenija imela konec leta 2010: enega, dva, tri ali – nobenega?

Ni razveseljivo, a je dejstvo: slovenska časopisna industrija je ‘na tekočem’ z najnovejšimi dogajanji v svetu. V Seattlu je založba Hearst prejšnji torek po 147 letih izhajanja ukinila tiskano izdajo dnevnika Seattle Post-Intelligencer, v Ljubljani pa je preteklo soboto založba Media Projekt izdala zadnjo tiskano številko dnevnika Indirekt. Oba časopisa ‘obstajata’ le še v spletu. Tudi to, kar je pred nekaj tedni naredilo Delo s spremembo samostojnega in plačljivega Maga v brezplačno prilogo, v takšni ali drugačni obliki po svetu že nekaj časa poskušajo še nekateri založniki (denimo manchesterski Evening Standard, kmalu pa mu bo menda z delom naklade sledil londonski istoimenski dnevnik, ki ga je nedavno prevzel ruski milijonar Aleksander Lebedev).

Seattle P-I je od 150 novinarjev obdržal 20. Ti bodo za spletno izdajo predvsem prirejali vsebine drugega Hearstovega mestnega dnevnika Seattle Times in skrbeli za ‘interaktivnost’ strani s tem, da bodo v komunikaciji z bralci obdelovali mestne teme. Ni videti, kako bi se račun lahko izšel: z ukinitvijo tiskane izdaje je SP-I ob kakšnih devet desetin svojih prihodkov, stroške pa je z zdesetkanjem števila zaposlenih in ‘prihrankov’ pri papirju, tisku in distribuciji zmanjšal za tri četrtine. A tudi, če bi se časopis iz Seattla z 1,8 milijona različnih obiskovalcev mesečno lahko ‘vzdrževal’ zgolj s spletno izdajo – kakšen smisel ima spletna izdaja Indirekta? Eh, najbrž podobnega kot brezplačna priloga Mag po izkušnji Dela z brezplačnikom Total tedna. Nekaj je pač treba početi, če ne, bi bilo, med drugim, treba novinarje takoj poslati na cesto.

Naklada ameriških časopisov je, po najnovejši raziskavi neodvisnega inštituta Pew Research, objavljeni pretekli teden, lani  padla za nekaj manj kot 5 odstotkov (na 48 milijonov), oglasnih prihodkov je bilo manj za približno petino, dobički so v primerjavi z letom prej nižji za 14 odstotkov, delovnih mest pa je bilo za desetino manj. Da je bralcev spletnih izdaj vse več oziroma da je splet postal najpomembnejši vir informacij za večino Američanov, je dvomljiva tolažba, kajti oglasni prihodki v spletu so se komaj kaj povečali.

_{There are growing doubts within the business, indeed, about whether the generation in charge has the vision and the boldness to reinvent the industry. It is unclear, say some, who the innovative leaders are, and a good many well-known figures have left the business. Reinvention does not usually come from managers prudently charting course. It tends to come from risk takers trying the unreasonable, seeing what others cannot, imagining what is not there and creating it. We did not see much of it when times were better. Times are harder now.
In the last year, alternative news sites, have continued to grow, including those produced by journalists who have left legacy newsrooms, but their scale remains small. The new media in aggregate are far from compensating for the losses in coverage in traditional newsrooms, and despite enthusiasm and good work, few if any are profitable or even self-sustaining.}

Grdo je in še grše bo, je še preden je britanski DMGT napovedal odpustitev več kot tisoč zaposlenih  zapisal Steven Johnson, ameriški popularizator znanosti in tehnologije: mesta bodo ob časopise, novinarji in uredniki ob službe, boleč proces spreminjanja poslovnega modela pa bo trajal najmanj desetletje.

_{It is ugly, and it is going to get uglier. Great journalists and editors are going to lose their jobs, and cities are going to lose their papers. There should have been a ten-year evolutionary process: the ecosystem steadily diversifying and establishing its complex relationships, the new business models evolving, the papers slowly transferring from print to digital, along with the advertisers. Instead, the financial meltdown – and some related over-leveraging by the newspaper companies themselves – has taken what should have been a decade-long process and crammed it down into a year or two. That is bad news for two reasons. First because it is going to inflict a lot of stress on people inside the industry who do great things, and who provide an important social good with their work. But it’s also bad news because it’s going to distract us from the long-term view; we’re going to spend so much time trying to figure out how to keep the old model on life support that we won’t be able to help invent a new model that actually might work better for everyone. The old growth forest won’t just magically grow on its own, of course, and no doubt there will be false starts and complications along the way. But in times like these, when all that is solid is melting into air, as Marx said of another equally turbulent era, it’s important that we try to imagine how we’d like the future to turn out and set our sights on that, and not just struggle to keep the past alive for a few more years.
/…/
The funny thing about newspapers today is that their audience is growing at a remarkable clip. Their underlying business model is being attacked by multiple forces, but their online audience is growing faster than their print audience is shrinking. As of January, print circulation had declined from 62 million to 49 million since my days at the College Hill Bookstore. But their online audience has grown from zero to 75 million over that period. Measured by pure audience interest, newspapers have never been more relevant. If they embrace this role as an authoritative guide to the entire ecosystem of news, if they stop paying for content that the web is already generating on its own, I suspect in the long run they will be as sustainable and as vital as they have ever been. The implied motto of every paper in the country should be: all the news that’s fit to link.}

Čeprav se že Johnsonove napovedi zdijo dovolj temačne, jih drugi ameriški tehnološki ‘guru’ Clay Shirky zlahka preseže. Nič, nič ne bo delovalo, česar so se časopisi doslej naučili in kar so poskusili, sploh pa nekakšnega enotnega poslovnega modela, ki bi jamčil preživetje, nikoli več ne bo. Ker – deluje lahko kar koli. V nasprotju z najbrž prevladujočim mnenjem, da so časopisi (kot denimo glasbena industrija) ‘zamudili’ splet, Shirky meni, da so videli, kaj se dogaja, le da je bili vsi njihovi odzivi napačni.

_{Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.
The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the ’90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan: “Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!” The details differed, but the core assumption behind all imagined outcomes (save the unthinkable one) was that the organizational form of the newspaper, as a general-purpose vehicle for publishing a variety of news and opinion, was basically sound, and only needed a digital facelift. As a result, the conversation has degenerated into the enthusiastic grasping at straws, pursued by skeptical responses.
/…/
Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.
With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.
/…/
Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.
When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.}

Navzlic vsemu, kar se zdi, da časopisni založniki širom sveta počnejo, da bi rešili panogo pred odmrtjem, ni gotovo, da se jih veliko zaveda, da gre za, hm, strukturno in ne konjunkturno krizo (ne glede na to, da je mogoče strmoglav padec oglasnih prihodkov od lanske jeseni pripisati splošni krizi). ‘Odgovori’ na dogajanje so namreč v glavnem tipično ‘protikrizni’. Trudijo se predvsem z zmanjševanje stroškov (plač in honorarjev, dopisnikov v tujini in potnih stroškov, števila zaposlenih, števila in obsega izdaj, reciklažo istih vsebin v različnih izdajah …) kot da jim ne bi bilo jasno, da tako poceni kot so novičarski agregati nikoli ne bodo mogli biti. Google News bo vedno lahko cenejši, tako rekoč brezplačen, čeprav po letu 2007 ‘dobaviteljem’ vsebin plačuje vedno več. Prejšnji teden je spletni velikan, denimo, sklenil pogodo z Epo (ja, ta povezava vas pelje na Googlovo stran z novico AFP), evropskim ‘konzorcijem’ tekstovne in fotografske ponudbe nacionalnih tiskovnih agencij; AFP in AP kot eni izmed največjih agencij sta na Googlovem plačilnem seznamu že skoraj dve leti, od večjih se pravzaprav upirata še Reuters z lastnim novičarskim portalom in nemška DPA.

Kajpak, najkasneje deset let po smrti časopisov bo mrtev tudi Google News. A danes je novica, ne, novinarstvo, commodity, potrošna dobrina. Novinarstvo? Katero novinarstvo?