When the Newspaper Dies

On Sunday I posted a diary at Daily Kos about the rapid end of newspapers and the threats to magazines. I called it Gloating Over Dying Newspapers? Think Again because I noticed a certain glee in blog posts (at Daily Kos and elsewhere) over the death or threats to the existence of newspapers. Some comments that followed denied anyone was gloating, followed by a number of other comments that, well, gloated. I tried to keep the post direct, uncluttered with a lot of links, to make a simple point. Judging by some comments, I'm not sure I got through. I noticed later that Paul Starr at the New Republic made similar points--though with excellent historical background and analysis--and got similar responses.

That post follows with one quote and link added, and after that a few additional links and quotes.


Some in the blogosphere seem to take great pleasure in the demise, threatened and actual, of U.S. newspapers. Focusing on greedy corporations, some with a political agenda, as well as infuriating big name columnists and political reporters, and glorying in the success of the Internet and the blogosphere, they gleefully greet this rapid series of newspaper deaths--or at least fatal illnesses--as the triumph of the new media over the old.

Be careful what you wish for. While all those objections and characterizations may be valid, they aren't the whole story. The death of major city newspapers and threatened national magazines will deal the blogosphere a mortal blow, as well as leaving major gaps of information that eventually may threaten the civil order. This is a very big deal.

Paul Starr writes, "More than any other medium, newspapers have been our eyes on the state, our check on private abuses, our civic alarm systems. It is true that they have often failed to perform those functions as well as they should have done. But whether they can continue to perform them at all is now in doubt."

There is one transcendent reason why this becomes a serious problem for the gathering and communication of news: newspapers pay thousands of reporters a living wage that enables them to report. By and large, the Internet does not.

This is the case of an information medium dying off before its replacement is ready.

What percentage of the content on blogs like [Daily Kos] originates in newspapers? I'd be surprised if it was under 90%, in terms of actual information, actual reporting.

Even when blogs break a story--as Daily Kos and Talking Points Memo did recently in exposing Bobby Jindal's false account of being where he wasn't during Katrina--the information that the stories put together and compare come largely from wire service and local newspaper stories.

Most of what appears in the blogosphere is opinion, comment, synthesis and reporting on reporting. There have been cases where citizen reporters have been marshaled to analyze documents, etc. but those are special instances. There's a limit to how much reporting can be done without reporters paid a living wage to report.

Without newspapers, without magazines, we're left with a small number of reporters for U.S. radio (mostly NPR) and reporters for television news--and all of them depend to a large extent on newspaper reporting.

I'm writing this as people in Colorado are in shock over the closing of the Rocky Mountain News. Despite its right wing advocacy, it did significant reporting, and became integral to a regional identity.

Now here in northern California we learn that the San Francisco Chronicle is weeks away from possibly closing. This will leave a major city, and a major center of future-oriented activity, without a daily newspaper. The Philadelphia Inquirer and News are in bankruptcy. Even the New York Times and Washington Post are on shaky ground.

The reasons for all this are beyond the scope of this diary, except to say if you look carefully, many of these businesses are in trouble not because the newspaper specifically is failing. It's not all about a preference for the Internet as a news source.

What I do want to focus on are the reporters. Newspapers function because they pay people a living wage--most often a union wage. (It seems to me that some of the statements by publishers and corporate types complaining that newspapers have failed to "adapt" is yet more code for getting rid of unions, which usually means the Newspaper Guild.)

A few of the larger blog sites employ reporters and editors. But not many--and I doubt many of these are union wage jobs. I would be very surprised to learn that the total number of paid reporters on the Internet surpasses the number of paid reporters on one daily newspaper in a mid-size American city.

This is not lost on some folks in the blogosphere and elsewhere. Though Josh Marshall is optimistic about the Internet's future, he also admits: "If all the big papers disappeared right now and we replaced them with 50 TPMs, it wouldn't come close to doing the job," he said.

From that same Washington Post article: "If you don't have people out working as full-time reporters, there's this category of information that's not going to appear magically out of nowhere," said Nicholas Lemann, dean of Columbia University's School of Journalism.

There are a number of proposed solutions out there, and frankly none of them seem very good to me.(I am specifically not endorsing charging for information online.) But the first step is to recognize what is at stake here, and this is my first diary in that regard. It's a time to be alarmed. It's not a time to gloat. --30--

Here's an additional quote from an excellent article on the ramifications for local and political news coverage by Marc Fisher in the Washington Post:

Many bloggers say that far from being able to replace professional reporters, they actually suffer from the diminished flow of state news. "What I can't offer on my blogs is the relationships, the institutional memory, the why, the history that reporters who know the capital can bring to their stories," says Waldo Jaquith, who blogs on Virginia politics and runs a site, RichmondSunlight.com, that tracks every bill. "Newspapers can describe the candidates for governor in a more balanced, deeper way because you don't have a dog in the race. We bloggers do."


Here are some additional relevant passages from Starr's article:

Should we care? Some observers, confident of the blessings of technology, refuse to shed any tears for the traditional giants of journalism, on the grounds that their troubles are of their own making and of little consequence to the general welfare. In this view, regardless of whether newspapers successfully adapt to the Internet, new and better sources of news will continue developing online, and they will fill whatever void newspapers leave. Others are so angry at the mainstream media--the reviled "MSM"--that they see the economic misery of the press as a deserved comeuppance. Let the bastards suffer.

These reactions fail to take into account the immediate realities and the full ramifications of the crisis threatening newspaper journalism. This is no time for Internet triumphalism: the stakes are too high. Nearly all other news media, except for online news, are also retrenching, and--particularly at the metropolitan, regional, and state levels--the online growth is not close to offsetting the decline elsewhere. Despite all the development of other media, the fact is that newspapers in recent years have continued to field the majority of reporters and to produce most of the original news stories in cities across the country.

Drawing on studies conducted by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, Tom Rosenstiel, the project's director, says that as of 2006 a typical metropolitan paper ran seventy stories a day, counting the national, local, and business sections (adding in the sports and style sections would bring the total closer to a hundred), whereas a half-hour of television news included only ten to twelve. And while local TV news typically emphasizes crime, fires, and traffic tie-ups, newspapers provide most of the original coverage of public affairs. Studies of newspaper and broadcast journalism have repeatedly shown that broadcast news follows the agenda set by newspapers, often repeating the same items, albeit with less depth.

Online there is certainly a great profusion of opinion, but there is little reporting, and still less of it subject to any rigorous fact-checking or editorial scrutiny.

No online enterprise has yet generated a stream of revenue to support original reporting for the general public comparable to the revenue stream that newspapers have generated in print.

Whether the Internet will ever support general-interest journalism at a level comparable to newspapers, it would be foolish to predict. The reality is that resources for journalism are now disappearing from the old media faster than new media can develop them. The financial crisis of the press may thereby compound the media's crisis of legitimacy.

Already under ferocious attack from both left and right for a multitude of sins, real and imagined, the press is going to find its job even more difficult to do under economic duress. And as it retrenches in the face of financial pressures, Rosenstiel says, "More of American life will occur in shadows. We won't know what we won't know."