So: Here's the long-promised post about the demise of newspapers. And before I start, here's a post on the subject that should get you warmed up. And when you're done laughing at the widdle college journalist in all his self-sufficient bird-of-paradise plumage (which, by the way, is molting), you can read on.
Now: First off is the fact that even if newspapers were the single most reliable source of objective information on the planet, they'd still be going down. The outdated publishing business model relies on a few people owning the massive (and massively expensive) printing technology needed to produce and distribute the product, so when that same product becomes readily available for cheap as free (as happened when newspapers hit the Web), the entire structure of the industry basically collapses. Even before the Internet, pubs like glossy fashion magazines were produced at a loss because of the massive amount of money poured into ink and paper (the former of which is phenomenally expensive in any quantity). The printing industry in general is suffering, but it hit newspapers especially hard because they frankly don't have that good of a supply/demand model going on in the first place. There's a really good article about that here, which compares the current era to the pre- to post-Gutenberg transition (which was very messy and took about a century). It's a fascinating read in its own right, but you should also keep it in mind when reading the next part of this post.
The whole conversation with my excoworker started when she e-mailed me this piece of maudlin tripe about two journalistic cliches (His Girl Friday and All the President's Men) flipping a coin to see who would stay and who would go. Leaving aside such gag-inducing passages as this:
They didn't feel sorry for themselves. They'd stood outside enough burning rowhouses, interviewed enough mothers of dead children, counted enough corpses in fetid Third World killing fields to know what real tragedy looked like. They knew that the great gears of society whir and spin. Industries rise, and industries fall. To take any of it personally was like getting mad at the rain.
But even so, something bothered them. After telling so many stories, no one would be around to tell theirs.
(where, incidentally, the second paragraph belies the first), the whole thing smacks of a righteous self-pity and a feeling that once newspaper journalists don't have newspapers to write for, journalism itself will be a dead thing and we'll slide into the long, low abyss of uninformed hell.
Which is, frankly, bunk.
Journalists as we know them today are the product of a couple centuries of basement printing presses and overwrought hyperbole all wrapped into an implausable monopolistic industry of information dissemination. Before newspapers as we know them existed, there was always somebody who asked around and got things published so that people were informed and corruption was exposed. The problem is that for these people, once newspapers took off it became an industry, and with that industry came power. For all their talk about "speaking truth to power," most major newspapers as we know them are/were actively working to promote the agendas of their top brass. As I put it in my first response to my friend:
I'm going to be candid here.
During the last election, papers like the NYT had whole teams in Alaska and Arizona going through dumpsters, trying to dig up anything they possibly could about the Republican nominees. Meanwhile, the Democratic candidates' highly unsavory connections and public gaffes went uninvestigated, covered over and outright ignored. It was just the latest, most egregious and most painfully obvious incident in a long string of "we're the deciders, we know what's best" behavior that effectively drove away half of their potential reading audience. And now they complain that "no one wants to read newspapers"? Cry me a river! The column below is a perfect example of the stomach-churning levels of self-importance that journalism has sunk to. It's like listening to the swan song of the buggy makers, lamenting the loss of the noble horse and carriage. "How will people ever get around without our equipment to carry them? Surely they can see that only our way is the right way! These mechanized conveyances will never be able to take our place!" People have needs, so they find ways to fill them. But if they find something that can fill it better they'll go with that. They ditched the horse and buggy for the automobile; they're ditching newspapers because they found better ways to get the news. If "journalists" can't adapt, then they'll go by the wayside. And falling back upon the stage, hands to their foreheads, bemoaning their fate ("Oh, if only the people had seen the error of casting us aside! Oh, if only they hadn't discarded our wisdom!") isn't going to win them back any friends.
"It takes no special genius to point out that if you are contemptuous of your customers, you are going to have a hard time getting them to buy your product. Newspapers are no exception." - Rupert Murdoch
I hope I haven't lost any friends with this, but journalism isn't a calling. It's a job. And like any job, it changes. It becomes less exclusive. There is no great secret to calling around and asking questions. Anyone with an Internet connection can be a journalist. You either roll with it, or you die.
It was a rant, no questions asked, that came from my visceral response to the whining sludge of the column linked above. What I came to articulate over the next few days was that "journalists" are really just Nosy Nellies with a knack for worming out facts from people who would rather they stayed hidden. Unfortunately, when the apparatus of exposure serves almost exclusively the interests of one side of the argument, the other side finds their trust broken and their loyalty moved to another outlet. In this case, it moved to blogs, independent or professional Web sites that serve as both trumpets of personal opinion and collaborative efforts in making the news. I say collaborative because the process that normally goes on behind closed doors in newsrooms is out in the open, where any reader can challenge the proprietor's assertion and be heard. Instead of a letter to the editor that never gets published or a correction box buried on page six, bloggers who botch a story can find themselves dragged through the mud before you can say "ink-stained wretch." This is especially true on the right side of things (the "dextrosphere", as I like to call it), where conservative and libertarian bloggers are known to eat their wounded,
then shoot them. Interestingly enough, liberals ("sinistrophere") tend to support and close ranks around those in the mainstream media (probably because they support the same viewpoints).
My friend responded with questions about how the Web can be a viable money-maker (a valid question, since, in most cases, it really can't unless you're big and have lots and lots of readers), but she also asked about fact-checking and editorial oversight in the blog world. My response (some of which rehashes the previous paragraph):
Actually, I find that fact-checking on the Internet is more rigorous than in a traditional media environment -- if you get something wrong and somebody calls you on, it's public and unavoidable. It's not a buried little box on page A16, it's all over your competitors' front pages. When you work on the Web, you're not accountable to a boss, you're accountable to your readers. That, I think, is part of what screwed the MSM in the first place. If you try to be an Internet journalist and you consistently put in a poor job, you're either a) not going to have readers or b) be absolutely savaged by your peers. Blogs eat their wounded. One of the great things about it is that if Blog A isn't covering a story (or is covering it with a slant or obvious bias), Blog B can provide better coverage or another take on the story. The reader can go where they want to get their news. And yes, that does lead to insulated thinking in a lot of areas, but at least the alternatives are out there and readily available. The London newspaper culture follows this model -- they have something like eight different dailies that range from hard left to middle of the road to hard right, and they're all doing just fine, thank you. If you don't like one paper's take on something, you just pick up another one. There's none of this "We're the beacons of light and goodness and the proles are just too unenlightened to see it" attitude (well, okay, there is, but like I said: If you don't like it, you can just pick up another paper). I think what the article is bemoaning, too, is the "loss" of the *idea* of the journalist -- the hardbitten reporter with the fedora and rolled-up sleeves, banging away at a manual typewriter after everyone but the cleaning lady has gone home. Problem is, *that hasn't gone away*. That type of person is still around; they're just up at all hours in their pajamas instead of suspenders and pinstripe slacks. There will still be journalists and mainstream media outlets for a long time to come; their role and appearance are just changing, is all. And, frankly, blogs can't survive without them. But what they need to realize is that without these untrained upstarts to hold their feet to the fire, they'll just keep spiraling down into irrelevance with the rest of the dead industries of history. Competition is what makes humanity thrive, and the MSM has gone without it for far too long.
As for the pay, well, the biggest blogs charge thousands of dollars a month for advertising on their Web sites. It can be big, big business. And even if you don't have enough readers to support that, there are always other ways to get money. If writing is that much of a calling for you, do freelance work and technical writing and things like that to pay the bills. Heck, write that novel you've been sitting on since high school (it's what I'm doing!). Take a job at the Tastee Freeze for all I care; just don't expect me to pay for your self-indulgence if I'm not getting what I want out of it.
What it basically all came down to was that my friend was hung up on the idea of unbiased reporting (and newspapers being the only source of that). It doen't help that the only blogs she reads are along the lines of celebrity gossip attention whore
Perez Hilton, which is
not the kind of blog I was thinking of At. All. And of course there are bloggers who are so incredibly biased that they're unreadable unless you agree with them, and some of them have thousands of readers and actually influence elections. But that's the whole point of the Internet: It puts that gathering-of-like-minded-people dynamic on the global table, letting anyone from anywhere get into the game at any point they see fit. Most people blog for their own pleasure; some people blog solely for the money. But the really hot sellers tend to blog about things that people want to hear about - namely, fresh takes and detailed explanations of old ideas. Yes, sometimes it's an echo chamber. But we're
all on the editorial board. Besides, when news of things like JournoList (a private listserve where hard left top journalists and policymakers discussed and blatantly shaped the media landscape), it makes the need for accountability that much more urgent. Plus, for all its "stick it to the man"-style posturing, the MSM needs to accept that it
is The Man. Has been for a while now. Get used to it.
The point of all this, I suppose, is that journalism per se isn't going to go away at all. Rather, it's becoming more accesible to anyone with an Internet connection. You might have to work a little harder for it, but frankly, I don't see where that's a bad thing. I never really learned how to construct an argument or investigate an issue until I got involved in blogging (which, granted, was about two days after I plugged in my ethernet cable my first year at college, so it's been a few years). It's weeding out the doers from the users, the wheat from the chaff: People who truly want to get to the bottom of something will do it no matter the medium. My friend did have a good line in one of her e-mails that while writing is a calling, journalism is a field - but even that, I think, shows a mistake in perception. Journalism as a field is overrated. The moment they styled themselves professionals, they set themselves up for eventual humiliation. Basically, they wrapped their identities in their medium of choice, and when that changed they found themselves suddenly grounded by a slew of pretentious upstarts. How dare they question the wisdom of the keepers of the news!
To which the bloggers said: "Pthbthbthbthbthb."
Eventually, it all comes back to my lead: You can't have supply without demand. Like any other disappearing cultural element, newspapers have their mourners. My grandfather has shared his love of reading the paper with his morning coffee, and many others of his and my parents' generation have similar tastes. But when you get to my generation, we don't have that. We didn't spend enough time as adults in the world of print-dominated media for a serious attachment to form, so if we can get the same news for free online, it doesn't strike us as a loss. My grandfather's preference was formed over decades, so of course the idea of the newspaper's demise strikes him as a bad thing. I don't begrudge him that at all; it's always sad when a pivotal part of one's life goes by the wayside. But nostalgia doesn't pay for ink.
