Death Be Not Proud

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In a 3.31 New Yorker piece called "Out of Print: The Death and Life of the American Newspaper," Eric Alterman notes that in a recent episode of The Simpsons, "a cartoon version of Dan Rather introduced a debate panel featuring 'Ron Lehar, a print journalist from the Washington Post.' This inspired Bart's nemesis Nelson to shout, 'Haw haw! Your medium is dying!' "'Nelson!' Principal Skinner admonished. "But it is!" came the young man's reply.

IlIustration by Gerald Scarfe

"Nelson is right," Alterman writes. "Newspapers are dying; the evidence of diminishment in economic vitality, editorial quality, depth, personnel, and the over-all number of papers is everywhere. What this portends for the future is complicated." But Alter comes up with a tight and sobering assessment later in the piece.

"We are about to enter a fractured, chaotic world of news, characterized by superior community conversation but a decidedly diminished level of first-rate journalism," he says. "The transformation of newspapers from enterprises devoted to objective reporting to a cluster of communities, each engaged in its own kind of 'news' -- and each with its own set of 'truths' upon which to base debate and discussion -- will mean the loss of a single national narrative and agreed-upon set of 'facts' by which to conduct our politics.

News, in short, "will become increasingly 'red' or 'blue.' This is not utterly new. Before Adolph Ochs took over the N.Y. Times, in 1896, and issued his famous 'without fear or favor' declaration, the American scene was dominated by brazenly partisan newspapers. And the news cultures of many European nations long ago embraced the notion of competing narratives for different political communities, with individual newspapers reflecting the views of each faction. It may not be entirely coincidental that these nations enjoy a level of political engagement that dwarfs that of the United States."

Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post (which just surpassed the Drudge Report in readership), tells Alterman that the online and the print newspaper model are beginning to converge: "As advertising dollars continue to move online -- as they slowly but certainly are -- HuffPost will be adding more and more reporting and the Times and Post model will continue with the kinds of reporting they do, but they'll do more of it originally online."

She predicts "more vigorous reporting in the future that will include distributed journalism -- wisdom-of-the-crowd reporting of the kind that was responsible for the exposing of the Attorneys General firing scandal." As for what may be lost in this transition, she is untroubled: "A lot of reporting now is just piling on the conventional wisdom -- with important stories dying on the front page of the New York Times."

comment #1

T. Holly says ...

Why can't newspapers sell their links to the highest website bidder?

comment #2

Stephe96 says ...

One of the funniest things in 'Minority Report' is when the husband being cheated on at the beginning saw his wife's boyfriend...while he went outside to pick up the newspaper on the lawn! 50 years in the future and there are still paperboys delivering papers? I think that will be all over within 5 years!

comment #3

T. Holly says ...

But not, like Arianna says, if newspapers fully embrace the web.

So what I'm saying is, why can't newspapers sell their links to the highest website bidder to help pay for first-generation news gathering?

I mean, isn't there some way to make pages viewable at the newspaper's website, but block directed traffic, unless the website pointing to it pays a fee?

I'm saying it clearly and being plain, by demand, if a bit like a capitalistic pig, but share the wealth, share the cost.

comment #4

Richardson says ...

It seems misleading to compare Huffington to Drudge, since Drudge just links to other people's stories, where Huffington generates most of its own content.

comment #5

T. Holly says ...

Richardson wants you to know he knows better or doesn't have the reading comprehension required to read the NYer.

comment #6

Mgmax says ...

Minority Report was a movie in which an urban cop in a Hong Kong-crowded city of the future could afford a fashion mogul's apartment AND his place by the seashore.

The news business will figure out how to make money at making news as soon as the dead intellectual weight of the newspaper business is out of its way. I mean, honestly, all you have to know about how doomed newspapers are is look at the page that once drove circulation, the funny pages. The average newspaper has at least 7 or 8 comics that date back to the 60s or even the 30s. How many shows that old are on network TV? If the newspapers ran the TV networks, we'd still have Ma Perkins, Fibber McGee and Molly and Leave It To Beaver in prime time. And TV would still be mostly black and white.

comment #7

Jay T. says ...

I agree this will be a disaster... the decline of news journalism will end up being one of the most important stories of the first half of this century, and ironically there won't be anyone around to put it in its proper context and write about it. News is already devolving into a fucking headline blurb as it is...

comment #8

christian says ...

Both can co-exist with streamlining.

comment #9

christian says ...

Both can co-exist with streamlining.

comment #10

Jay T. says ...

"I mean, isn't there some way to make pages viewable at the newspaper's website, but block directed traffic, unless the website pointing to it pays a fee?"

The answer to your question is... no way. That would be contrary to how the web works to begin with, which is why Google built their entire company around that concept. The idea of charging a site for linking to one of your pages is ridiculous...

comment #11

Bocephus says ...

Newspaper will be out until we replace the paper. Soon we will have newssheets that pull stories of the internet via wifi. Think iBook but wafer thin and pliable, you only have to buy it once. You will be able to configure your own front page, select your favorite reporters to automatically update, and finally be able to look at the comics page without Family Circus siphoning the funny from all the other strips.

People will spend the money that they normally spend on newspaper subscriptions on individual monthly fees for their favorite content providers. Providers that use better journalists will get more subscriptions and will be more successful. Journalism will not die, it will flourish in the market system once the newspaper monopolies finally die out.

And people will miss newspapers about as much as they miss the steam engine today.

comment #12

Mgmax says ...

Why is pliable a prerequisite for news?

The only reason newspapers are as big and unwieldy as they are is because it favors selling large ads to department stores which are not exactly in the healthiest of shape, either.

Remember, advertising drives media forms. Figure out who the advertisers will be and you decide what the format is and who the audience is.

comment #13

Bocephus says ...

You can fold it in half, tuck it under your arm or put it in your pocket, and you still get big pictures and text that is big enough to read without getting a headache (I have a pocket PC that I never use to check the news because having to constantly side scroll to read a page is annoying, I'd rather wait till I'm at my computer).

The point is for the experience to be like a newspaper, but without all that messy paper and ink. There is still room in this model for advertisement; ad supported free content, commercials on demand, discounts on your news sheets if you agree to have permanent rotating ads on some pages.

comment #14

Jay T. says ...

Who here has a subscription to a daily newspaper? Not me, everyone my age (late 20's) I know reads their news online. Sadly, it seems like every source just uses the AP for everything...

comment #15

T. Holly says ...

Bocephus, that's really smart, I plugged you.

http://www.mcnblogs.com/thehotblog/archives/2008/03/a_good_quote_ab.html

comment #16

Richardson says ...

"Richardson wants you to know he knows better or doesn't have the reading comprehension required to read the NYer."

To be honest, this is jumbled enough that I don't really understand what you're trying to say, but I will nonetheless point out that the statement I mentioned as seeming disengenuous was not presented as a quote from the New Yorker; the blog entry presents it as a non sequitur inserted by Jeff. The two things being compared are different enough that the comparison is meaningless, and -- given that it's attempting to prove something -- seems misleading to me.

comment #17

T. Holly says ...

I can't take anymore of the long article but it goes on, at great length, to explain that HuffPo is not a first-generation news gathering operation, but engaged in (what Wire showrunner David Simon calls) "the froth of commentary and debate" siphoned off the top making for "reaction and debate and commentary -- some of it brilliant" but nonetheless, not news gathering.

And so while losing some crickets/journos is tolerable, losing all of them, wholesale, while newspaper monopolies die out and the Bocephus model comes in, is like civilization being wiped out.

comment #18

Mgmax says ...

You want to know why this is NOT a tragedy? Here's the state of big journalism in the biggest story of our time, according to the Columbia Journalism Review:

"Five years into the war, news organizations have understandably cut back a bit, given the immense cost of maintaining a Baghdad bureau. From life insurance for reporters to guards, armored cars (which not all bureaus have), and fortified houses outside of the Green Zone, reporting from Iraq is an incredibly expensive proposition.

"But embedding with infantry units is free. Flights to Kuwait, where the Army public affairs team picks you up and puts you on a military aircraft to Iraq, and insurance still cost, but once you’re embedded, your expenses end. And that’s why I can’t understand why every major news organization doesn’t have one reporter embedded with a combat unit at all times. They won’t always be able to file stories, but they can contribute a steady stream of material about the fight—and the ground-level diplomacy—being waged by young American captains, lieutenants, and sergeants. The fact that I spent four weeks in Iraq and only ran into one stringer working for an American newspaper is testament to how few reporters are out in the field."

Now read what a freelancer did:

http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/2008/03/the-dungeon-of-1.php

comment #19

T. Holly says ...

The name of the name of the one you can trust is changing, but it can't be a party of one to be trusted.

http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/the_grunts_and_the_press_1.php?page=all

comment #20

Bocephus says ...

Good quote? Sure, but I was just describing the concept of the newspapers from Minority Report.

All the good ideas come from science fiction.

comment #21

T. Holly says ...

Cool! I replugged you.

comment #22

T. Holly says ...

I meant here:

http://www.thereeler.com/the_blog/lower_your_voice_nathan_lee.php

comment #23

T. Holly says ...

I meant here:

http://www.thereeler.com/the_blog/lower_your_voice_nathan_lee.php

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