Retraction
Is the newspaper industry too big of itself to fail?
It’s no news that the slow decline of the print industry has rapidly become a death spiral for numerous newspapers across the country. From the fall of papers like the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and the potential collapse of other major metro papers like the San Francisco Chronicle and even the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the final spasms of the printed daily have been violent and, unfortunately true to form, self-indulgent. While some like Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders fatalistically mash their sour grapes and others like AP head Dean Singleton threaten the new media with legal action, a few like LA Times columnist Rosa Brooks search for the same solution any failed American corporation with a faulty business plan has adopted - demand a federal bailout:
I can’t imagine anything more dangerous than a society in which the news industry has more or less collapsed.
If newspapers become mostly infotainment websites — if the number of well-trained investigative journalists dwindles still further — and if we’re soon left with nothing but the yapping heads who dominate cable “news” and talk radio, how will we recognize, or hope to forestall, impending national and global crises? How will we know if government officials have made terrible mistakes, as even the best will sometimes do?…
It’s time for a government bailout of journalism.
If we’re willing to use taxpayer money to build roads, pay teachers and maintain a military; if we’re willing to bail out banks and insurance companies and failing automakers, we should be willing to part with some public funds to keep journalism alive, too…
There’s a sense of great irony in Brooks pushing for her only her “for-profit” experience - generating an occasional column for Los Angeles’ major daily - to mirror the rest of her employment history in the non-profit worlds of education (teaching at Georgetown) and government (working at the Pentagon). But perhaps that’s not surprising amid the ignorance of both free market forces and what constitutes a “free press” in Brooks’ final column.
Setting aside the obvious facts that A) “journalism” isn’t confined to the corners of the printed word, and B) not all newspapers are about to shut their doors, how exactly will giving government financial control over more arms of the media prevent or expose the catastrophes of political abuse that Brooks foresees in a newspaper-less world? What in-depth criticisms or insights into, say the Stimulus bill or the latest budget, has the mainstream press uncovered? Brooks might well suggest that the pacificity of the press corps is precisely why America needs to “invest” in newspapers, but the role of critical investigative journalism is alive and well with the “yapping heads” of cable news. If anything, Brooks’ proposal, which vastly outstrips suggestions by other liberals such as The Nation’s concept of reducing mailing costs for periodicals or Sen. Ben Cardin’s (D-MD) bill to make newspapers non-profits, would only undermine the very journalistic freedoms Brooks seeks to preserve.
The newspaper industry doesn’t just feel it’s too big to retract, but apparently too big to change. A contrast in such opinions couldn’t be more apt than with Veronique de Rugy’s NRO post celebrating the transformational spirit of the Wall Street Journal’s former editor Barney Kilgore who almost single-handedly saved the paper in the 1940s:
When Kilgore became managing editor of the Journal in 1941, he inherited a business model that technology had undermined. Founded in 1889 to provide market news and stock prices to individual investors, the Journal lost half its circulation as this basic information became widely available.
Kilgore observed that then new media such as radio meant market news was available in real time. Some cities had a dozen newspapers that had gained the Journal’s once-valuable ability to report share prices.
The Journal had to change. Technology increasingly meant readers would know the basic facts of news as it happened. He announced, “It doesn’t have to have happened yesterday to be news,” and said that people were more interested in what would happen tomorrow. He crafted the front page “What’s News — ” column to summarize what had happened, but focused on explaining what the news meant…
Kilgore led the Journal’s circulation to one million by the 1960s from 33,000 in the 1940s by adapting the newspaper to a role reflecting how people used different media for news. His rallying cry was, “The easiest thing in the world for a reader to do is to stop reading.”
Almost 70 years later, Kilgore’s cry might be amended to say that the second easiest thing to do is to ask for the government to subsidize what the reader refuses to buy. Newspapers can find a new niche and possibly even thrive. They’ve done so before and can do so again. But the first step in changing behavior is admitting there’s a problem. And if the parting shots of many like in the medium like Brooks are any indication, despite decades of decline, newspapers remain stuck in denial.
Cross-posted at Truth Vs. The Machine. Comments welcome.
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