Newspapers Die By Their Own Ignorance
Most local papers have become jokes since their budgets have been cut to the point of being nothing more than corporate bulletin boards and vehicles for the hilarity that is Ziggy while things like investigative journalism have become ‘expensive’ luxuries instead of defining pieces that create a legacy.
With that in mind, when I read that newspapers are being killed by the internet, all I can think is good riddance. Centralized talk pieces that decide what’s important for us are antiquated and laughable in an age where we are approaching individual equality in publishing and collaboration.
Budding journalists need not despair as there will always be an audience for good journalism, the lack of which is exactly why newspapers are dying.
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Comments (11)
Who’s going to train and pay all those “budding jounralists”? You can do better than repeating the usual blogosphere propaganda about “centralized” media deciding what’s important. That’s simply editorial judgment, and it happens every time someone decides to write about something in a blog. Of course, since almost all blogs are vanity pages, bloggers have no compelling reason to actally attempt to collect and report news.
Newspapers were losing money long before the internet showed up. Why? Because their advertisers have access to cheaper, better platforms. (For most papers, home delivery is not a profit center.) Newspaper readership, especiially of local papers, is down because our increasingly mobile society means people don’t live long enough in one placce to care what happens there, and because reading, of anything, is down. Soundbites on TV work because that’s what people want; lengthy newspaper articles go ignored.
Newspapers don’t have to be printed on paper. In the future, successful newspapers will find ways to use this technology to distribute copy and advertising. I’ll always trust good newspapers before I trust the unsourced and unverified meaderings of anonymous bloggers. Who cares about the opinions of bloggers? That isn’t reporting.
I’d like to point out that I said nothing of bloggers or blogs in my post. In fact, there are a lot of emerging publications that are internet only and are pursuing good journalism. Blogs are another discussion altogether, but that wasn’t what I was referring to here.
I don’t at all disagree with you Christian, but I’d like to reiterate the point that newspapers aren’t in decline because of internet competition, they’re in decline because of television.
They’re in decline because reading is in decline.
I personally favor reading my news on the internet. Searches and hyperlinks are a tremendous compliment to reading comprehension and information gathering. And I do think that blogs have their merits.
I won’t miss newspapers. (although it is nice to be able to fold them under your arm to take to the park, and in spite of being able to do anything with a computer “better” than you can with printed word I still enjoy the visceral pleasure of turning pages)
But I do not view the decline in local newspapers as a good thing. If anything I think it means that information is becoming MORE centralized through radio and television corporations.
The above ideas really aren’t my own. I’m stealing from Al Gore.
Please give this recent speech of his a read Christian. I’m interested in your opinion.
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1006-28.htm
You know how much of a turd I feel Al Gore is, but that speech really made me think.
I disagree. In writing a response, it became so long that I turned it into a post on my own blog: http://www.livejournal.com/users/girlkate/26764.html
Most local papers are made up of reprinted AP or Knight-Ridder stories and even the editorial page is crowded with syndicated columnists. Grab your local paper and figure out what percentage of stories are actually distributed from a national wire service. It’s a depressing exercise.
To the newspaper, this is a great way to save money. It’s one less reporter you have to pay when you can just buy the story that canned and distributed factory style.
Tom, television has been around for quite a while at this point and I don’t see it as the culprit for the struggling newspaper business. The internet is the much larger cause and on two levels. Most newspapers made the majority of their revenue not from ads or subscriptions, but from the classifieds. The rise of craigslist has destroyed this revenue source very quickly. The other giant red flag for the newspaper business is that their readership is very very old. Readers like Kate are very much in the minority and once the older readership dies, existing papers will be left with too little readership to survive and I have a hard time believing younger customers are going to appear when they know how to take advantage of the glut of content on the internet.
I completely agree with Kate that the dead-tree vehicle for news is much more convenient than reading on any available electronic screen. Paper has a dramatically higher resolution, can be folded without worry and thrown across the room when I’m done with it. This is a problem that will be eventually solved though. Eventually, an iPod equivelant for print will emerge and the dead tree version will seem silly, but I do believe that’s a good decade or more off when materials research is in a much healthier place.
I saw all of this with a long history of reader the paper. I grew up in a household that made a point to get the local paper, which became extremely upgraded when we moved to nyc and the local paper became the New York Times. In the years since, I have subscribed to the NYT and made a habit of reading it end to end every single day. I was better for having done so, but in recent years have dropped the habit of doing so.
These days, I use the web almost exclusively for my info consumption, but I do occasionally take advantage of my laser printer if I want to read something on the go.
Tom, a comment specific to the Gore essay you pointed out: It’s a decent essay and I appreciate Gore, but I think his Current TV project has the right idea, but misses the point. They are spending a lot of money trying to wiggle their way into the lineups of traditional cable television monopolies. They would be better off on focusing on taking advantage of video over the internet as their medium which fits perfectly with their target demographic.
Regarding the syndicated content in local newspapers – I’m certainly aware of this. I think it’s a smart way to save money, especially on national stories where they just can’t afford to send a reporter somewhere else. Getting “canned”, syndicated content is a trade-off. It allows them to spend their resources wisely and end up with a certain amount of high-quality content, rather than spreading themselves too thin trying to cover everything.
And don’t forget that editorial judgement is still applied in the case of AP / Knight-Ridder stories. They still carefully select which stories to run, and the prominence with which to run them.
As far as columnists go, I’m much less interested in general. I think that’s an area where blogs can stand in with a similar result. Opinion pieces like that are better on the web, where they can be discussed.
The point is this: It costs money to employ a staff of reporters who are paid to cover the news in a paper’s target area. That money is provided by advertising revenue. Over the last few decades, newspapers have typically seen their advertising revenues threatened by competition from TV and radio, from decreasing circulation prompted by disinterest in reading and in local affairs, and a preference for the sound bite.
That’s why almost every newspaper, local or not, is predominantly wire service copy. You need some kind of copy to create the spaces for the ads. It’s cheaper to buy stories from a service than it is to pay staffers. Remember, ther continued existence of any commercial news operation depends on ad sales, not on how many of its stories are written by its own employees. Newspapers have no obligation to go into debt to bring you self-produced news you probably wouldn’t read anyway.
The web has the technological potential to replace paper as the delivery vehicle for news. But, potential is a long way from reality. Infatuation with technology should not blind us to commonsense standards for evaluating the words we read. The technology used to deliver the words is nothing compared with the words themselves.
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I agree with your Gore comment Christian. I love the first part of his speech. It touches a nerve with me because I believe politics are dangerously dominated by big business. I also love the apocalyptic angle of it. But his solution seems confusing and anticlimactic.
I’m also unfamiliar with what you are talking about. I do not know what “video over the internet” is. My understanding of the Gore speech is that he’s not so much after using the internet to broadcast “live” television as much as he thinks it is important to have the much lauded and anticipated future of customizable, interactive, television free of censorship by large media conglomerates.
It seems like he wants to ensure that we can rapidly change television channels via a customizable internet connection much like we flip around with the 500 channels that comcast offer us. Something beyond what Tivo, On Demand, or downloading shows in mpeg (or whatever format it is, my computer is too crappy to handle it).
I might be misunderstanding what he’s trying to say, but I also have a hunch that Gore doesn’t exactly know what he’s talking about, and I of course trust that you know more about streaming media than he does.
Mostly I just thought his point about the decline in newspaper variety being relative to the rise of television was relavent to this recent blog posting. Newspapers aren’t the only thing in danger. Reading itself and mainstream variety are suffering. The web is still the underground.
I guess I’m pretty much there with Billg.
[...] began this entry as a response to Christian’s blog post, “Newspapers Die By Their Own Ignorance.” When I realized how long it was getting, I decided to put it here instead… I [...]