Impermanent Press

If you believe NewsBusters (and I, for one, have difficulty putting stock in anything calling itself a news organization when its name conjures images of the Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man), not only is “liberal bias” killing newspapers, but this is, somehow, a good thing. Leaving aside for a moment the fact that one should choose one’s news based on accuracy and thoroughness in reporting rather than on ideological grounds, the mass die-offs in our print media are cause for concern, not rejoicing.

I’ve written about this previously (you can read the original piece here, if you’d like), and rather than reiterate what I’ve said–to say nothing of what others have stated better, and at more length–I’d like to quote a bit from a study published by the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. It’s titled Do Newspapers Matter? Evidence from the Closure of The Cincinnati Post. While anecdotal evidence (and recent surveys like this one from Pew) suggest that newspapers have become an increasingly marginal means of getting the news, study authors Sam Schulhofer-Wohl and Miguel Garrido argue that even with diminished circulation, newspapers have an impact far beyond their sales figures:

The Cincinnati Post published its last edition on New Year’s Eve 2007, leaving the Cincinnati Enquirer as the only daily newspaper in the market. The next year, fewer candidates ran for municipal office in the suburbs most reliant on the Post, incumbents became more likely to win re-election, and voter turnout fell. We exploit a difference-in-differences strategy–comparing changes in outcomes before and after the Post’s closure in suburbs where the newspaper offered more or less intensive coverage–and the fact that the Post’s closing date was fixed 30 years in advance to rule out some non-causal explanations for these results. Although our findings are statistically imprecise, they demonstrate that newspapers–even underdogs such as the Post, which had a circulation of just 27,000 when it closed–can have a substantial and measurable impact on public life.

The following newspapers and newspaper chains are either financially troubled, or have ceased publication:

Advance Publications [chain]
The Albuquerque Tribune
The Ann Arbor News
The Baltimore Examiner [closed]
The Boston Globe
The Capital Times
The Charlotte Observer
The Chicago Sun Times
The Cincinnatti Post [closed]
The Cleveland Plain Dealer
The Detroit News
The Fort Worth Star Telegram
Gannett [chain]
Hearst [chain]
King County Journal [closed]
Lexington Herald-Leader
McClatchy [chain]
The Miami Herald
The Minneapolis Star Tribune
NY Daily News
Oregonian (Portland)
The Philadelphia Daily News
Rocky Mountain News (Denver) [closed]
San Francisco Chronicle
Seattle Post-Intelligencer [closed; online-only]
St. Paul Pioneer Press
Star-Ledger (Newark, NJ)
Tucson Citizen
USA Today

Papers listed as “troubled” are, in the main, hanging on by the skin of their teeth. It’s worth noting that many of the papers listed are owned by publishing conglomerates. In addition to diluting the flow of ideas, another reason that concentration of ownership is a bad idea is becoming glaringly apparent. As the old maxim goes, shit rolls downhill; when a parent company like Gannett–which, in addition to USA Today, owns 80 dailies across the United States–experiences trouble, those difficulties cannot help but spread outward to the other links in the chain.

It’s worth noting that if the Chronicle folds, this will make San Francisco the only major metro area in the country without its own daily. At first blush, this may not seem like much–there’s television news, and there’s still no shortage of outlets online. A recent bill before Congress proposes to allow newspapers to restructure as nonprofits; it’s a bit early yet to tell whether this will work (if it even passes), or if it’s too little too late. But one thing we can safely say, as the Pew research would seem to indicate and as Schulhofer-Wohl and Garrido have shown (and as common sense whispers to us every so often), the loss of so much of our ability to gather, analyze, and disseminate news should be a sobering thought for anyone who cares about the civic health of the United States.

Further Reading/Sources:
This brief segment on MSNBC sparked the above article. This story from AP (and this one, which ran in Editor and Publisher) had more to say, while this piece in 24/7 Wall Street stirred up some controversy.