Why Your Newspaper Should Become Infrastructure

For most of its history, nobody needed to decide whether a local newspaper was a media company or infrastructure. It printed a newspaper.

That activity happened to produce several other things at the same time. A community acquired a recurring record of itself. Businesses had somewhere familiar to advertise. Public meetings and local decisions became visible beyond the room where they happened. Births, deaths, elections, school events, fires, arguments and ordinary accomplishments accumulated into an archive that could still answer questions years later.

The newspaper was obviously media. People wrote stories, took photographs, sold advertising and assembled pages. Yet some of what accumulated around that work behaved increasingly like infrastructure because other people began relying on it.

I think that distinction matters now.

Calling a newspaper a media company isn't wrong, but it can make the published artifact look like the entire product. Once that happens, the obvious measures become audience, traffic, engagement and the performance of individual stories. Those things matter. A story nobody reads isn't accomplishing much, and a newspaper that can't support itself doesn't get extra credit for having admirable intentions.

The problem begins when those measures become the only things we can see.

A story can attract relatively little traffic while becoming part of a record that matters five years later. A directory listing may never go viral but can answer the same useful question hundreds of times. A calendar entry may be valuable precisely because somebody finds it, gets the information they need and leaves thirty seconds later.

Measured as media engagement, some of those interactions look unimpressive.

Measured as usefulness, they're doing their job.

That's where the infrastructure analogy becomes helpful to me. Infrastructure doesn't mean boring, publicly owned or physically local. It means that other activity begins to depend on something being reliably available. A road becomes important because people use it to reach somewhere else. A payment network matters because commerce assumes payments can move. The value isn't confined to the thing itself; some of it appears in what people can do because the thing is there.

A newspaper can acquire that property too.

If someone wants to know what the town board approved six months ago, there should be somewhere to look. If a local organization changes its meeting time, that information should have somewhere durable to live. If a business advertises with us for years, each new transaction shouldn't begin as though we've never encountered one another before. If a reporter covers a project from proposal through construction, later reporting should be able to carry the earlier history forward instead of rediscovering it.

None of that replaces journalism.

It makes journalism more useful over time.

The distinction becomes especially visible online because the web gives newspapers a choice they didn't really have in print. We can treat each article as an isolated piece of content competing for today's attention, or we can let articles accumulate into something larger. A story can connect to a place, an organization, an author, an event and earlier reporting. A business advertisement can connect to a durable profile instead of disappearing when the edition changes. An event mentioned in an article can also exist in a calendar where someone looking specifically for events can find it.

The article remains an article.

It simply doesn't have to carry the entire relationship by itself.

This changes how I think about platforms too. Facebook can distribute a story extremely well. Google can help someone discover it. Email can bring it directly to a reader. Radio can introduce it to somebody who wasn't looking for it at all. Print can put it on a kitchen table where it may remain for a week.

Those are useful forms of distribution, and I don't want the newspaper to reproduce them all.

What I don't want is for any one of them to become the only place where the underlying relationship exists.

If Facebook changes, we should still know our advertisers and subscribers. If a search engine changes its ranking, the archive should still exist. If an email provider has a problem, the newspaper shouldn't forget who its readers are. Losing a distribution channel can hurt without requiring the institution itself to disappear with it.

That is an infrastructural concern.

The same thinking changes advertising. For years, a print advertisement could be remarkably simple. A business bought space, supplied artwork, the ad appeared, and next week the physical page changed. Much of the relationship surrounding that transaction lived with the people who handled it.

Digital publishing gives us an opportunity to preserve more of what was useful without turning advertising into surveillance. A business can have a durable presence that remains available between campaigns. An advertisement can lead somewhere useful. Orders, approvals, publication and billing can leave records instead of dissolving back into email. The newspaper can remember the relationship without needing to build a behavioral profile of the reader.

That still doesn't make advertising infrastructure in some grand sense. It makes the advertising operation more durable and gives local businesses something they can repeatedly use.

The same principle applies to community information. A calendar doesn't need to compete with journalism for attention. A directory doesn't need to pretend to be a story. An archive doesn't need an engagement strategy.

They have different jobs.

Once those functions are allowed to remain distinct, the newspaper becomes less dependent on asking every page to perform the same economic trick. Some things attract attention. Some preserve information. Some help people discover businesses or organizations. Some establish a relationship with a subscriber. Some become more valuable simply because they've remained available long enough to accumulate history.

The economics don't magically solve themselves. Infrastructure still has to be paid for, and usefulness doesn't guarantee enough revenue to sustain the people producing it. A small newspaper can build an exquisitely useful local system and still go broke.

That constraint matters because it prevents “become infrastructure” from turning into another slogan.

The useful question is which capabilities strengthen the work the newspaper is already positioned to do.

A newspaper already has relationships with readers, businesses, public bodies, community organizations and people who regularly provide information. It already produces a recurring record. It already has editorial processes for deciding what gets published and people whose job requires them to notice changes in the community.

Those existing relationships create possibilities that would be expensive for a new platform to manufacture from nothing.

They don't guarantee that the newspaper will use them well.

A bad directory is still a bad directory. An archive nobody can search may preserve information without making it particularly useful. A community calendar that isn't maintained eventually teaches people not to rely on it. Infrastructure earns its role through repeated use, not by calling itself infrastructure.

That is probably the biggest change in how I think about the newspaper.

I don't want to turn it from a media company into an infrastructure company. That simply replaces one category with another and invites us to start optimizing for a different abstraction.

I want the newspaper to notice which parts of its work people already build upon and make those parts easier to rely on.

Sometimes that means technology. Sometimes it means keeping information structured enough that it can appear in more than one place. Sometimes it means preserving an archive, maintaining a directory, improving an advertising workflow or making sure a reader's relationship with the newspaper doesn't depend entirely on a social platform.

Sometimes it simply means continuing to send a reporter to the same town meeting month after month so that when a project finally reaches completion, somebody remembers how it began.

That's infrastructure too, if the word is useful at all.

Not because the newspaper declared itself essential.

Because continuity accumulated until somebody depended on it.

A local newspaper still has to make media. It should make good media. Stories should be worth reading, photographs should be worth looking at and important reporting should reach as many of the people who need it as we can reasonably reach.

The opportunity is to stop throwing away everything that forms around those artifacts once today's edition becomes yesterday's.

The relationships can remain.

The records can remain.

The accumulated context can remain.

And tomorrow's reporting can begin from there instead of starting over.

Maybe that's what it means for a newspaper to become infrastructure. Not that it stops being media, or that communities can't live without it, or that durability somehow makes it virtuous.

It means enough useful things have been allowed to accumulate around the journalism that people can begin building on yesterday's work.

Then we keep showing up tomorrow.