According to Steven Pearlstein of The Washington Post, yes.
Pearlstein tackled the big issue facing newspapers - the emergence of new media and the shrinking profit margins of traditional media - and decided that newspapers can survive. But only if they adapt properly.
Right now, many newspapers are trying to cut their way to success by not only reducing the number of employees but also reducing the size, scope and quality of their news product. Space for national and international news is shrinking; news services and columnists are being dropped; coverage of business or religion or the arts is reduced or nearly eliminated. This strategy is silly on two levels.To begin with, people are becoming better educated, more sophisticated and more global in their orientation, not less. The days are long gone when daily newspapers could satisfy readers -- particularly the younger and more affluent readers that advertisers crave -- by hiring inexperienced young reporters to write desultory stories about city council and planning board meetings or by filling much of the news hole with bowling scores, school lunch menus and bad photographs of high school sporting events.
News executives will often try to justify dumbing down their product, or making it more parochial, by explaining that local coverage is their unique competitive advantage and that readers who want more can always get it somewhere else these days, often for free online.
Pearlstein advocates newspapers settling for diminished profit margins for the time being, keeping their rosters full of talent, and putting out a stellar product. That hasn't been the trend lately - papers are cutting staff left and right, cutting pages from sections and cutting travel budgets steeply.
All of that results in an inferior product that no one - especially young people - wants to consume. Why would young people open up their newspaper to see four pages of middling local sports coverage when they could just as easily log on to ESPN.com for comprehensive national, regional and local coverage?
Newspaper executives will have to ask themselves this and other questions and come to the logical decision: Newspapers have to offer readers something worthwhile, or else the industry truly is doomed.
In Pearlstein's words:
"If you ask me, the challenge facing our industry is not that readers have lost faith in their newspapers, but that newspapers have lost faith in their readers."
- Asher Fusco