Michael Wolff: What lies ahead for newspapers?

Should we feel bad about ourselves?

Virtually every public company that holds substantial print assets — including the one that owns this paper — is pushing them, and us, out the door into a separate, stand-alone enterprise. Time Warner cut its ties to Time Inc., the once-great magazine publisher. The Tribune Co., keeping its television stations, has created a separately traded entity called Tribune Publishing for its newspapers. News Corp. now holds Rupert Murdoch's newspapers, while 21st Century Fox has his entertainment properties. E. W. Scripps sent its papers packing. The Washington Post was pushed out by the public entity, controlled by the Graham family, that owned it. (In a reverse move, but arguably to the same effect, The New York Times has sold all its other businesses and reduced itself to a stand-alone paper.) And now Gannett has announced that it will create two companies, one with its television and digital assets, the other with USA TODAY and its 81 community newspapers.

We are the spun-off people.

In large part, it's a Wall Street thing. Print gets a lower multiple than other media assets, hence dragging down the share price of a company with faster-growing properties. In fact, Wall Street tends to reward companies that do such a spinoff with a price bounce, meaning shareholders get a stake in a new company pretty much for free. What's not to like — at least if you're a shareholder?

But if you are a beat reporter or copy editor or columnist or editor in chief, we descendants of ink-stained wretches — my own mother went to work for the Paterson Evening News, a paper in New Jersey, in 1942 — it is hard not to wonder: What is to become of us?

Print, many people argue, is dead — or quickly dying. Ken Doctor, an analyst who has covered the industry's fall, puts newspaper revenue decline at more than 50% in the past few years.

Still, many newspapers and magazines are profitable. Such profits continue to derive more from print than from digital — which, almost everyone believes, somewhat paradoxically, is the future of print. The New York Times has been as aggressive and as adept in its digital ambitions as any paper, but it is still supported by its print business. The future may be desktop and mobile, but if print dies before that future arrives, it is quite unclear what will happen to the Times and, as well, the rest of us. Curiously, or alarmingly, print companies — as Wall Street will realize when it turns to evaluating these new print-focused stocks — could be even more profitable, albeit with fewer people.

While this is not to argue than any of us (or more of us) should be fired, it is to acknowledge our quite extraordinary existential predicament: It really is sink or swim. And, increasing the existential confusion, we might wisely wonder just exactly what business we're trying to survive in.

Throughout my mother's career and for a good part of my own, we were really in the manufacturing business. The most vital and valuable aspect of what we did was to print. The New York Times building on West 43rd Street, where I first went to work in the 1970s, was a factory, with heavy machinery making a product with a great roar and thud starting every day around 6 p.m.

Then, newspapers were more directly and openly in the advertising business, with papers often called The Such-and-Such Advertiser. People who wanted to place ads called up newspapers, which had operators waiting to take their orders — something like the more or less automatic process that now happens at Google.

Nowadays, it's much less clear what an organization of people broadly curious about the world and eager to collect facts about it is supposed to primarily do or be. We're journalists, of course, trying to address the common good — perhaps more squarely part of a newspaper's mission than at anytime in the past (this is disputed only by people who don't remember how low newspaper ambitions could be when they didn't have to try very hard). And then there's the information business — that is, being able to provide data and analysis that people will actually pay a lot for, Bloomberg being something like the ultimate example of this. And there's the content business, which, in the new vernacular, with sponsored content, or content marketing, is another way to say advertising — Vice has mastered this business. And there is a broader idea of the news business, cross-platform, on demand, and more and more about ceaseless hunter-gatherer-type aggregation. And, of course, there is a digital/social/mobile strategy — think BuzzFeed here.

A reasonable business method might be to just pick one approach and bet on it. On the other hand, no newspaper or magazine has yet truly reinvented itself and unlocked the secret of future success. So perhaps it is best to keep all options open until a promising way appears.

And, too, there is a natural desire not to throw away what has worked so well up until just a short time ago. This is not only because there are still vast numbers of readers and because many print businesses still make a good buck, but also to not be so cavalier about one's way of life and achievements.

We are, however (no getting away from it), not working for Facebook, a job that at this moment probably feels pretty good. Wall Street clearly doesn't give great value to what we do. Often our own children seem to wonder why we do it. But on the brighter side, the powers that be aren't so much taking our livelihood from us as they are giving it back. Ready or not.