There’s been a lot of talk about the state of journalism these days, mostly by serious journalists (Mort Rosenblum’s been talking about it for years). Like bookstores, newspapers and news magazines are closing down at an alarming rate, which has real journalists in a twist. The Internet’s spawned some unintended consequences. Huffington Post, for example, a “news aggregator,” and—much worse—sites like ThoughtCatalog that give voice to … well, honestly, I don’t know how to categorize it. It’s not news but it competes for readers’ time.
But an article in this month’s Vanity Fair—“The Front Page 2.0”—has some very interesting thoughts about what’s been called the Publishing Disruption in my industry but might more generally be called the Communication Disruption.
If you could go back to, say, 1994, two decades ago, and if you could have told newspaper publishers that soon they’d be able to produce and distribute a daily newspaper at no cost for newsprint (that’s the paper, not the ink), that they could shut down those huge presses and dispense with troublesome unions once and for all, and that they wouldn’t even need paperboys (or girls) anymore to throw the paper into the neighbor’s bushes—if you could have told them that all these costs were about to plummet to near zero—the publishers would have thought, Now, that sounds like a pretty great deal. I’ll take it. So how has this unexpected gift from God turned into such a disaster for them?
What hath the Internet wrought indeed. The author points out the newspapers can save that money “only if people are actually willing to give up the paper paper in favor of a computer screen.” We’ve all said it: I’d rather read a real paper book. Right? But we’re in that Disruption. Things are changing:
One man is responsible: Jeff Bezos, with the Kindle. His legitimation of electronic reading will be seen as a far more important contribution to saving newspapers than his purchase of the Post.
Aha. One of the things the author notes, too, is
the high quality of the Times’s content—the very quality that alarmists claim is becoming unaffordable as a result of bloggers and other cheap competition—will be the paper’s salvation, because people will pay real money for it.
He’s right; I pay $15 a month to be able to read the Times and I know others who do too. None of us live in New York. There will always be a demand for high-quality goods, and news is no exception.
I could go on and on. But I want you to read the article—so let me just say I’m feeling more hopeful about the future of good journalism.
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As a former newspaper reporter back in the dark ages, I’m not as optimistic as you or Vanity Fair. It’s important not to have just one paper, but more than one–and somebody has to be alienated from the governing authorities for us to get any real news. So many stories out of Washington these days would have been covered with ferocity by the 1970’s Washington Post, and are being yawned at today.
It’s appalling and frightening, frankly.
And don’t get me started on TV entertainment, er, “news.”
Some of this is owing to the WaPo no longer being owned by a newspaper person, but a business man; some of it has to do with all the nepotism currently going on between media and the political body. Whatever the reason, the public is ill served because there’s no one willing to do the hard, and expensive work, of digging and investigative reporting.
I’ve had friends complain for years about the NYT’s liberalism and how wonderful it’s having trouble and I have consistently argued NO, we need a vigorous and active press for America to run well. We need to have people attend all those boring civic meetings and report on them. We need to buy the newspapers so we can know what’s happening before a fiat falls upon us. We are ill served by a weak fourth estate and you can see the results in the US right now.
I’ll get off the soap box and return to 1914 where the reporters are working hard, angry with the censors, and still news is being reported–because people would buy newspapers then to find out what’s “really” going on.
Of course to “really” know what’s “going on” you have to read from several different sources–and preferably political spectrums. At least, that’s what I learned back in the dark ages in the college newsroom.
Great observations. My concern has been that for-real, professional journalists have been marginalized in favor of “citizen journalists” — who are really just idiots, most of them. Or wannabes but with no preparation for what it takes.
I agree it’s frightening what’s happening with “news” now but what I took away from this is where/how we get our news is in flux. Newsprint newspapers just can’t compete with online, unfortunately. (Nor can magazines; think Newsweek. Time’s gotten very thin too.) And only the privileged can afford to pay for good journalism. The rest take what they can get for free, which is … slanted. I was encouraged about the mention of the various news websites that will specialize in aspects of the news — foreign policy, environmental issues, and so on.
It’s a strange new world and honestly I can’t wrap my head around how to keep what you and I know to be good against the context of the realities of the 21st century.