Reading this week's big-think pieces about newspapers, I found, in abundance, alternating flashes of the depths of despair and wild excitement over grand new possibilities -- often in a single story.
Not a healthy state of mind for an individual and not the firmest of bases for taking stock of the industry's troubles either.
I had thought about a survey of the week's full bounty, but for this item will stick with
one very good story by Eric Alterman in America's finest magazine,
The New Yorker. Alterman, in most of his work a proud left-wing political commentator, goes light on the ideology but aptly draws on history and political theory from Colonial times to elitist
Walter Lippmann, to
John Dewey to Poynter favorite,
James W. Carey. He makes the case that the best of the Internet (his example is Huffington Post) can provide a professionally-produced jumping off point for informed, diverse discussion in the best democratic tradition (especially if it leans liberal). He is on point and generous in assessing what big professional newspaper staffs still do that the diffuse digital media cannot nearly so well. This is an article worth reading and thinking about.
But (you sensed a but coming?) Alterman and his editors damn near spoil the whole thing by buying into the "dying industry" trope in the broadest and sloppiest way. Just what is their evidence that the print newspaper -- let alone the reconfigured, multi-platform industry -- is dying?
Alterman cites the usual declining numbers -- circulation, print advertising revenues, newsroom staff count, and market valuation. For rhetorical oomph, he produces numbers for only one of these four, stock prices/market capitalization -- surprise, surprise -- picking the one with the steepest downward slope.
As to the rest, there is a good deal of what
Kovach and Rosenstiel call the "journalism of assertion." I'll spare you a word count but many repetitions (in the headline too) of death, dying and such proxies as "dystopic," "doom" and "artifact." Saying it often makes it true?
Alterman writes that even the "dwindling number" who buy and read a paper daily are "spending less time with it: the average is down to less than fifteen hours a month." Hmmm.....30 minutes a day in a fragmenting media universe doesn't sound all that bad to me -- or to advertisers either, plenty of whom are still paying a premium rate for the print environment.
He cites some passages from speeches by
New York Times editor Bill Keller, describing "a loss of sense of mission" (but Keller was mainly arguing for the continuing essential function of what newspapers do). There are also several references to a talk Rupert Murdoch gave to the American Society of Newspaper Editors three years ago urging his distiguished audience to wake up to how sweeping and permanent the swing to the Internet is (timely then, old news now). He further builds his case by quoting, so help me God, dialogue from an episode of The Simpsons.
Apropos, I suppose, because the whole of the business lynchpin for the piece is cartoonish. Mixing arts metaphors slightly, Alterman is among many, looking at newspapers from afar, who want to go straight from The Music Man's "
You've Got Trouble Right Here in River City" to those
old cartoons (New Yorker cartoons, I believe) that showed a bearded man in sackcloth carrying a sign that reads, "The End is Nigh."
There is plenty of ground in between. That's where the industry is, and most everyone on the inside knows it. Working at newspapers now is less like a death bed scene and more like wrestling with alligators daily at a very granular level -- trying to decide, for instance, how long it keeps making sense to cash in the sophisticated contextual work of a retiring senior print reporter for a pair of young journos, dexterous at feeding the Web report.
Besides, with a national perspective, Alterman and
The New Yorker are woofing up the wrong tree.
The New York Times and
Washington Post (The New Yorker too) have the means to do journalism that informs their readers well as engaged citizens for a good long time. It is not so clear that the likes of the
Long Beach Press-Telegram or
New Haven Register will be doing the comparable function indefinitely for democracy in the communities they serve -- or that they are right now.
