Anyone who cares about the vitality of the American newspaper should read Paul Starr's excellent article in the most recent issue of the New Republic.
The plight of newspapers has become a familiar story. Declining print readership, and no established way to make sufficient advertising revenue online are the factors that have pushed the news industry into an economic tailspin. Craig's List decimated the classified ad business, which funded lots of reporting once in years gone by. Being in a severe recession--with the inevitable decline in advertising revenues that entails--hasn't helped at all.
As papers have struggled in recent years, one response has been to extol the virtues of "citizen journalists" as a way to move journalism forward. No more reliance on news reporting funded by ads for Rolex watches; it is time for power to the people.
I believe this approach is too strident, too dismissive of the important contributions to US democracy that the media has made over the years (think Watergate, Pentagon Papers, Iran-Contra.) And yes, there have been major failures too (think Iraq war and those non-existent weapons of mass destruction.)
Instead of the scorched earth approach to media criticism, I prefer a middle ground. New tools such as blogs and viral video can be very powerful journalistic tools, and there is no reason why everyday people shouldn't use them. Besides that, major companies like the Times now manage an extensive blog and multimedia presence. So it seems to me that "old" and "new" can be complementary rather than antagonistic.
That may be true, unless the old model completely falls apart because it is financially unsustainable. In his New Republic piece, Starr makes a compelling case for why we are close to reaching this point. Papers keep slashing staffs to cut costs, but this only makes their product less compelling than it once was. Meanwhile, there are literally thousands of freely available competitors online.
Marquee national brands like the Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post will weather this storm. But the major metro papers that aren't quite national are in dire straits; just this week, the Hearst Corporation announced that it will soon close the San Francisco Chronicle if it cannot find a buyer.
So what? All good things must come to an end, and people who want it will still get their news somehow. But as Starr shows (and as UC Berkeley journalism dean Neil Henry argued in his recent book American Carnival), the loss of a professional journalism base would have profound costs. The average blogger or citizen journalist simply doesn't have the resources to report as thoroughly as a full-time journalist. This isn't a criticism, just a fact--I knew this myself as a technology reporter for the Gotham Gazette, which generally involved cribbing from full-time reporters and cobbling together their reports into a synthesized whole.
The old/new complementarity I hope for assumes that the old model of journalism is robust. If it's not, we'll know less about what public officials are doing and our democracy will suffer.
To his credit, in the midst of his lament Starr never utters angry screeds about all that newfangled technology. He sees the benefits of new online tools for journalism, but places these benefits in the context of the established journalistic tradition that is ending before our eyes.
Finally, and mercifully, Starr offers some solutions for this crisis (partial solutions, at least.) In a nutshell: we need more philanthropy. We don't want government to ride to the rescue here, because we do need a free press--the feds can go ahead and nationalize the banks.
So the best place to turn is the non-profit sector. Starr profiles several innovative models for how philanthropists are revitalizing newspapers, while warning that we may never see the glory days again. The future seems grim, but it is not yet hopeless.
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