How the Newspaper Industry today is like the Soviet Union, circa 1989
As child growing up in the 70s and 80s, the Soviet Union appeared to be a highly organised and terrifying thing. Its people thought with one mind, and acted with one will. It was indestructible. Today, this idea seems demented.
Looking back at it now, the seeds of its destruction were sown in the early Brezhnev era. It just took a long time for the internal contradictions of their economic and political model to make the whole thing unsustainable.
Leading Soviet thinkers of the time – and it tells its own story that Yuri Andropov, one of the hardest of hardliners, was one of them – thought that the answer was reform. Eventually, after the hiatus of Chernenko’s brief period as General Secretary, Gorbachev emerged as the leader who everyone thought had the vision to bring about the changes that were needed.
Thanks to Gorby, the West’s Russian vocabulary extended from ‘Da’ and ‘Niet’ to include the words ‘glasnost’ (openness) and ‘perestroika’ (restructuring). Whereas Stalin, had he been alive, would almost certainly have thought the solution was an intensification of repression, and a retreat to the core values of the movement, Gorbachev thought that he could prop up the system by making it more like the West.
We know today that the Soviet Union collapsed six years after Gorbachev came to power, mainly as a result of the fact that glasnost could not be reconciled with keeping people like Andrei Sakharov and Nathan Sharansky prisoner, or maintaining the ‘anti-fascist protection barrier’ – what Westerners called ‘the wall’ – and the blatantly obvious fact that Soviet shops were empty and its people starving.
We will never know if it could have survived longer had the hardliners had their way, for example if the 1991 coup had been successful, or if someone other than Gorbachev had come to power in 1985. But what we do know is that genuine hardliners like Andropov – a man who’d been head of the KGB for years before he became General Secretary – thought that modernisation was the only way to survive.
With that lengthy exposition out of the way, let’s consider how this situation is directly analogous to the newspaper business of today.
At the start of this decade, the emerging consensus was that the newspaper industry had to modernise itself to adapt to the emergence of the internet: careful reform was the order of the day. Sales of physical papers were starting to slow, and requiring people to pay to access the content online wasn’t working. Even registration-walls (which should really be called spam-walls) were enough to make people look elsewhere. Fewer and fewer people were coming into contact with newspaper content.
The industry was faced with two options: retrench or modernise. It’s not clear exactly what they could have done to retrench. Probably, it would have involved cutting the number of sections in the paper and saving cost in order to bring the core content to a reduced readership. This wasn’t seen as viable because enough people could see that the internet was going to win eventually anyway. Retrenchment would have meant a very quick decline, and it was becoming obvious that, at some point in the reasonably near future, physical newspapers were going to cease to exist.
Which left just one option: modernise. And modernisation meant the internet.
Just as Gorbachev thought he was being daring by introducing small reforms, so the newspapers trumpeted their new clothes. A comment form here, a web-first story there. And it looked like it was working. As the pay- and registration-walls gradually came down, newspaper websites started to see huge growth in traffic, especially when they learned the dark arts of search engine optimisation (SEO).
But what they didn’t see, or at least ignored at the time, was the inherent lack of logic in this approach. They didn’t appreciate the fundamental differences between their old model, where they had control of every inch of the product, and the new one, where they could only expect to be a small part of a user’s daily experience of the web. Many newspaper websites have terms and conditions that explicitly forbid ‘deep linking’ without written permission, which is the equivalent of asking people round to dinner and then turning all the lights off and hiding in the airing cupboard.
The key word is there in that previous paragraph: users. Newspaper readers are not users. Newspapers had got very good at putting together a package of roughly accurate potted summaries of the previous day’s happenings, information that a single person could not possibly have put together for themselves. Today’s users are completely different. The time when people went to a site to see what was new has surely gone for ever. It is now possible to imagine, in the very near future, a service that can select relevant content as well as, or even better than, a newspaper’s editorial team can now.
Today, we are able to read expert, in-depth and free coverage of events on blogs and other sites that often far surpasses newspaper coverage for detail, quality and accuracy. If you follow a non-Premiership football team, for example, there’s nothing in the mainstream press for you except for the very biggest stories, which you will probably already know more about than the paper does by the time they print it or put it on their website.
If you’re remotely interested in technology, newspapers will have nothing of interest for you at all. These days they’re all abuzz about Twitter, but anyone with an interest in social media has known about it and used it – literally – for years.
Even breaking news – an area that traditional media organisations used to excel in – has gone. Of all the breaking news I heard in the last year, all but one story come to my attention via Twitter. Did you know there was an earthquake in Carlifornia on Monday, at around 6:30 UK time? I did, because I was using Twitter. Follow-up reports kept coming in every few minutes, so there was no need even to look for follow-up stories online. The same is true for the plane crashing in the Hudson, the first picture of which was on Twitpic. News organisations have become the middleman, when there’s no barrier to people getting news direct from the source.
One possibility no one thought of in the Soviet Union of 1985 was a truly radical approach to modernisation. What if they had seen the inevitability of collapse and made policies to accelerate it, even to embrace it? To out-west the west? It was unthinkable then, because the fundamental aim was to preserve Soviet Power (although of course the Soviets, in the word’s literal meaning of “local workers’ committee”, actually had no power at all). But any programme of reform that resulted in the end of Soviet Power was unacceptable to them, which is how they came to think there were only two options. The point of the CPSU was to preserve the CPSU.
Today, you see the equivalent of glasnost on newspaper websites across the world. The LA Times tried a wiki, the Telegraph are using Twitterfall, the Guardian have created an ‘open’ API, and so on. But the internal logic is that the content that people care about is coming from elsewhere, and the newspapers’ opening themselves to it will only hasten their decline. The recent calls for the reintroduction of paywalls are the newspaper equivalent of the 1991 coup, which was the hardliners’ attempt to deny reality.
As with the Soviet Union, it will be economic issues that are blamed for the collapse of the newspaper industry. But the recession, and the attendant collapse of print advertising revenues have only had the effect of speeding up the inevitable.
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3 Responses to “How the Newspaper Industry today is like the Soviet Union, circa 1989”
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I find your analogy with the Soviet Union stretches credibility. The Soviet economy collapsed largely because of the arms race and not just because of the contradictions of the command economy (there are plenty of contradictions in the capitalist system, aren’t there?). Post Soviet Union the former republics are pretty scary places so I’m not sure where that leaves us re your internet comparison.
One interesting aspect of this is that Gorbachev and the other glasnost leaders were terrified of Reagan’s Star Wars idea. Although it was laughed at in the West they talked themselves into believing it threatened their existence. It is tempting to see the death of print message as a similar phenomenon – we’re talking ourselves into the death of newspapers and periodicals, although they clearly will not exist in their current form. After all radio has survived not only TV but the internet too – infact the internet is a pretty good medium for radio.
I also think digital journalists have a false idea of how people in general want to gather their news – not everyone is twittering and reading feeds etc. #yam
You’re right that the right-wing consensus is that Reagan’s policy was responsible for the collapse of the Soviet Union, but I don’t think that’s correct. The economic stagnation didn’t come about because of the arms race, but because there was no engine to drive productivity other than fear. The Soviet economy had, basically, never worked. It had been driven by the mad dash to catch up with the West, pre-war and then the all-out effort to defeat the Germans. After Stalin’s death, or maybe more accurately after Khruschev’s “secret speech” to the 20th congress, there was only ever going to be one outcome.
Whatever success Stalinism could claim was built upon a gigantic lie. Once that lie was openly acknowledged, the USSR could never have survived.
I think it would have collapsed without the arms race, eventually, maybe sooner, and of course we’ll never know.
You say that no everyone is twittering or reading feeds. That’s true, in the same way that not everyone was using Facebook to keep in touch with their friends in early 2007. But the technology to do the job of an editorial desk is now clearly something within our reach. It is *only* a matter of time.
I agree that the future for newspapers as we currently understand them is bleak, as bleak as the fate of the post-collapse “republics”. And this is entirely their own fault. If the newspapers planned properly for the inevitable, indeed embraced it, it wouldn’t be nearly as painful as their current strategy of trying to shore up the old model.
Just to be clear: I’m not saying that the inevitability of collapse was obvious at the time, just that there was, in retrospect, no other possible outcome.
Further to your point on the arms race: if it *was* the arms race that caused the collapse of the Soviet Union, why did America not suffer the same collapse?