This month's Harper's includes a great essay by Richard Rodriguez about the declining state of American newspapers, especially the San Francisco Chronicle. (A very brief excerpt is online, and the complete text is available to subscribers.) He goes beyond a predictable lament about how the Internet has ruined the news, to a more focused and poignant critique about how the decline of metropolitan newspapers speaks to a decline in a city's sense of itself. We've already lost the Rocky Mountain News, and the San Francisco Chronicle came close to folding earlier this year.
Perhaps national newspapers will develop local niches throughout the country, a possibility that Rodriguez notes. (Lately the Times has started marketing itself as vital to the Bay Area, I've noticed in various coffee shops and on Muni platforms.) We may not return to a time when obituaries were a true remembrance of a town's people--Rodriguez is particularly saddened that obituaries today are almost all paid for--and when a columnist like Herb Caen could "set the conversation for San Francisco."
Other ways to bring people together now exist, such as Facebook, Twitter, MeetUp, and the like. But Rodriquez seems right that our larger "sense of place" is lost. But how much does this matter? He quotes a fellow journalist's observation that the news conversation is now global; an article from the Washington Post here, a blog post from the Huff Post there, and so forth. So perhaps we've sacrificed some localism for globalism, and we'll just have to get used to it.
There may also come a day when print fades away, except for high-end national newspapers (and maybe even for those). There are intrinsic qualities to print news--the texture, the sidebars, the funnies. But these are dispensable as long as there is good reporting that allows readers to make intelligent decisions. We shouldn't fetishize print just because it's familiar, but should be spending time figuring out how to fund online news gathering. Ads haven't worked on the Web, so we need another solution.
Some solutions--much easier said than done--are more direct government funding and/or greater foundation support. In these regards Michael Massing, Paul Starr, and Robert McChesney all have ideas worth exploring. Rodriquez is right that journalistic localism is on the wane, but I think we have larger challenges to contend with.
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