A Slight Delay

Seven hundred billion for Wall Street? Check. Another twenty to thirty billion for the Big Three automakers? Well, maybe. A few billion for struggling newspaper and magazine publishers? Don’t hold your breath.

Running a newspaper used to be practically a license to print money; circulation and advertising dollars made it relatively easy for a newspaper or magazine, if well-managed, to stay in the black. These days, though, things are a bit different. The litany of troubled papers and magazines reads like a Who’s Who, or a series of items from a journalism geek’s version of the gossip page: The Miami Herald, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune Company, and others have all suffered, some forced to cut back, and others being put on the auction block. Granted, the failure of a paper—even The Gray Lady—wouldn’t have the same impact on the economy that the demise of the banking industry, or the automotive industry, would. But there’s still reason to pay attention, and to care.

Let’s be clear on one thing: the economic downturn isn’t the only thing to blame for the Fourth Estate’s woes. Simple mismanagement plays no small part here, as it has in the other industries that have come before Congress with their hands out. But there’s another facet to the problem that’s been brewing for a long time. Like the music industry–who nobody, least of all me, is suggesting bailing out–publishers of all stripes have found themselves on the wrong end of technical innovation. While the internet, with all its uses and promise, has grown exponentially, it hasn’t grown so quickly that anyone who was paying attention could credibly claim to have been blindsided (least of all journalists, whose job it is to pay attention).

The music industry decided that its business model was more important to preserve than its customer base; after resisting anything that didn’t resemble the already-in-place, RIAA-sanctioned way of doing things, labels and distributors found themselves first bypassed by the marketplace, and then struggling to adjust and catch up. Similarly, newspapers and magazines have been notoriously slow to respond to the changes in reporting, advertising, investigation and distribution posed by the rise of news aggregators, blogs, and other online venues.

There’s still something–though a shrinking something–to the idea that print and broadcast media have a leg up on their online competitors. There isn’t a single “New Media” outlet that has the same respect and cachet that a major newspaper, or even some smaller-circulation newspapers, have. Because of the cash that backs them, news organizations are also often able to explore issues and stories with a length and depth often missing from digital media. Also, the idea of journalistic objectivity is at least paid lip service in the mainstream media, while the blogosphere especially seems to show a higher degree of bias from across the political spectrum (a criticism, by the way, from which I wouldn’t exempt myself).

On the other hand, by their nature, blogs and online media allow for greater agility and a faster response time to events as they happen. A newspaper may have “our man/woman in [fill in the blank],” but between budgetary concerns and the sheer impossibility of predicting everywhere that news will happen, it’s hard to report on every last thing that happens. You can’t assign ten reporters to a budget meeting in Peoria, but if ten of the people in attendance happen to blog what happened, you’ve got a snapshot of the thing as it occurred.

So far, so good. Problem is, bloggers don’t often have editors (the ones that do are–surprise–often attached to the online divisions of traditional news organizations). Thus, most stuff goes through with no filtering, fact-checking, or even simple copy-editing. With all that happens, everywhere and every day, someone needs to decide what’s news, especially since combing through the theoretically dozens of posts that’d be generated just by local news in a medium-sized city on an average day would be intimidating enough, not even taking into account international news, sports, entertainment, what-have-you.

So we’ve got a snapshot of the mess the news media are in. Why should you, or I, or anyone else, care? There are a few reasons.

First, consider Ben Bagdikian. His book, The Media Monopoly, has tracked the accelerating, seemingly inexorable, pace of media consolidation. With each succeeding generation, and each new edition of the book, the problem has only gotten worse. It isn’t that long ago that most cities had multiple daily papers; these jostled for space on the newsstands with more magazines and journals than what we have now. It’s not just the inkies that have declined in number. There are also fewer owners of the few papers and magazines that are left, which means a lot fewer of other things as well. There are fewer reporters, fewer outlets, and (let’s be blunt) fewer agendas. That means less initiative to give voice not only to what’s widely reported and considered newsworthy, but also to other stories that might otherwise be underreported, or overlooked completely.

Then consider Percy Bysshe Shelley, who once wrote that “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” What Shelley wrote of poets holds just as true of reporters and other writers. From Upton Sinclair and Jacob Riis to The Pentagon Papers or Woodward and Bernstein, journalism has acted, in a very real sense, as an unofficial fourth branch of government, forcing the more official branches to act by shining light so brightly and persistently on society’s ills that they couldn’t be ignored. At its best (and trust me, I know that it’s not always so), the press serves as advocates for the people when its government fails to do so.

Finally, though, consider the national discourse. The things we talk about and debate, or should be talking about and debating, have to come from somewhere. This should be too obvious to bear stating, but if you stop to think about it, the press gives citizens the tools with which to make informed decisions about the many things, large and small, that impact their daily lives. Earlier, I mentioned the agendas that drive the news. It’d be foolish to think that news is delivered daily by a newsprint-smudged stork. Human beings, not just with their eye on the public interest, but also with their foibles, biases, and sometimes blinkered vision, decide not only what is news, but how that news will be reported. Each time we take a voice out of that chorus, as it were, we run the risk of throwing off our sense of perspective. We need the New York Post (I know, I can’t believe I wrote that either) or the Wall Street Journal just as surely as we need the Village Voice or the Christian Science Monitor. This blending of left, right, and center is the system of checks and balances in the Fourth Estate that corresponds to that found in the Second Estate. This is something we need more, and not less, of… especially if the press is to do anything more than pay lip service to the idea of operating for the public good.

Further reading:
Nikki Usher writes on New business models for news are not that new at the Knight Digital Media Center, while over at the New Yorker, James Surowiecki has News You Can Lose. Finally, Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram writes perceptively about How the WSJ Failed the Web 2.0 Test, offering some insight in the process as to how and why the traditional news media have fallen behind the times. More recently, we have this from Slate.

Tags: bailouts, blogs, Media, newspapers

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 1st, 2009 at 8:54 pm and is filed under Media, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.