Who’s Killing the Newspapers?
Published on May 18, 2009
The bleeding of American journalism is causing bigger problems than you might think.
One of the peculiar things about the tropics is that, year round, it’s pitch dark at 5 in the morning. I know this because my first job as a kid was to get up at that hour, get on my bike, and go deliver copies of the Star & Herald, the English language version of Panama’s largest daily newspaper, La Estrella de Panama. That’s how I got my start in newspapers and, by the time I was 23, I’d worked for five of them.
Because of recent history, anything else I write about newspapers requires a disclaimer. The Camas Magazine project I was a part of (2000 to 2005) was, in a sense, an insurrection against the blatant abuses of a family-owned newspaper and its publishers. Among the several national journalism awards Camas acquired has this topic etched upon the plaque: How the Spokesman-Review Subverted Democracy in Spokane, Washington.
But picking a fight with a newspaper doesn’t mean that I don’t like newspapers. I like newspapers, a lot, and it saddens me that they are doomed. Yes, that’s right. Doomed. Not doomed to utter extinction, but clearly, by now, newspapers are in
headlong decline as an industry and when the trend bottoms out there will be far fewer newspapers and many fewer working journalists.
Why is that?
As newspaper readership has dwindled and a succession of newspapers (most recently the print-version of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer) has disappeared, there’s been no lack of soul-searching among journalists. I think what’s most frustrating to reporters is that corporate demands for high profit margins have at least accelerated the decline of newspapers. But journalists have also put themselves through the ringer. Much of the criticism, from inside and out, has been brutally on point and goes back at least to the irresponsible reporting by the New York Times’s Judith Miller and others who, wittingly or not, helped the Bush Administration sell a bogus weapons of mass destruction cover story to justify the Iraq war.
More recently, the business press is being roundly criticized for having been so star-struck by the gods of Wall Street that it failed to critically examine the fairly widespread evidence of fraud and abuse that triggered the current economic implosion. In its May/June issue, the Columbia Journalism Review has a package, entitled: Blindness, How the Business Press Missed the Meltdown, which is essential reading for anyone seriously interested in how journalism failed as an institution to protect the interests of the American public.
One noteworthy aspect of the CJR package is how it also accounts for the exceptional reporting that was done (even by small papers and reporters you’ve never heard of) and how much of it was prescient in terms of forecasting the coming collapse, or at least exposing the rampant unethical conduct that would bring it about. But these stories are exhibits for how the journalists who reported them were bucking the trend of the industry which (including the magazines and the cable networks like CNBC) was largely cheerleading the run up of the market and promoting investing over fact-finding.
Here’s how Dean Starkman put it in his cover story: “The business press exists within the Wall Street and corporate subculture and understandably must adopt its idioms and customs, the better to translate them for the rest of us. Still, it relies on those institutions for its stories. Burning a bridge is hard. It is far easier for news bureaucracies to accept ever-narrowing frames of discourse, frames forcefully pushed by industry, even if those frames marginalize and eventually exclude the business press’s own great investigative traditions.”
In other words, it really is as though reporters and editors, collectively, accepted that Wall Street was America, Inc., and notwithstanding clear-eyed reports of fraudulent and risky conduct, they focused, instead, on what they thought was the broader story of massive wealth creation and the colorful stories about the lords and geniuses behind it.
The profession’s introspection is healthy, and the failures documented are, in their own ways, tragic. And, yet, there’s not much evidence that it’s the lack of good reporting that’s killing newspapers. What’s killing newspapers is a generational shift in how most Americans prefer to get their news.
When the Pew Research Center surveyed Americans in 2006, it found, overall, only 43 percent had read a newspaper the day before. In just two years time, when Pew repeated the survey, the number had fallen four percentage points, to only 39 percent. But what is most pronounced, in both surveys, is the dramatic difference in readership among people born before 1946 and those born since, and particularly those born since 1965. Not only only are younger people about half as likely to read a newspaper, but when they do read a newspaper, they are increasingly reading the “paper” on-line.
The news for journalism, and those who value (or should value) in-depth reporting, is really much worse than the trend in readership indicates. The first reason is that the audience shift from newspapers to the internet has been happening at a much faster pace than the shift in advertising revenues from the print to the on-line format. That’s a big problem because, generally, even newspapers that have terrific websites still have the web product being heavily subsidized by the sale of advertising in the print version of the paper. According to Pew, in 2008 roughly 90 percent of newspaper ad revenue came from ads sold for the print version of the newspaper.
One irony in this is that as newspapers try to bolster their websites to compete for on-line readers, journalists actually have to work more, filing and updating more stories and blog postings. And yet the very beast they’re feeding–the internet–is what’s voraciously eating away at the industry’s traditional economic formula. Advertising rates are driven by the number of print readers, so the fewer people who read newspapers, the less newspapers can charge for the more lucrative print ads.
But here’s the second part of the one-two punch at the solar plexus of journalism. Investigative reporting is expensive and, for the most part, the traditional economic formula (reliance on print advertising) was the revenue pump for editorial budgets that could include foreign correspondents (or on a state level, correspondents to cover state capitols) and in-depth reporting.
At the risk of dispelling the notion that I’m a twinkly-eyed optimist, this is really bad news, pretty much everywhere. Sure, I understand the theoretical argument that newsprint is only a medium, and that the real product is the journalism. The problem is that the expensive, heavy lifting part of journalism (you know, the part that provides the basic juice of democracy) is not something that people by and large expect to pay for. It’s either there or it isn’t and if it isn’t there people will simply gravitate to the next best thing, like a funny column about how hard it is, these days, to know what’s really going on in government, or in banks and brokerage houses.
If you haven’t been reading journalism trade publications, then you have no idea how traumatized the journalism profession in America is by the recent trends. According to CJR, about 12,000 American reporters have lost their jobs since January 2007. What adds to the frustration is that there is a clear sense that the bloggish websites frequented by former newspaper readers are largely marketing in news stories generated by the hard work of print reporters.
I get that, and as an older, newspaper and internet reader, and friend of journalism, I have to ask: what’s the point? Is it that we should pass a law, requiring that internet readers run out and by several newspapers a day?
What I don’t see is much reflection at all about how bizarre the traditional economic model for American journalism (and most journalism world-wide, for that matter) is. Long before the supposed free lunch of the internet came along, journalists didn’t seem to be much bothered that advertisers paid their salaries. Advertisers. Not readers. Yes, you, dear newspaper subscriber, are only paying for the cost of delivery with your subscription. It’s ad sales that pay for everything else.
Does that matter? Do the views of advertisers influence coverage? Darn right they do. Sometimes, it’s only as innocuous as newspapers and magazine writing “news” copy to float special advertising supplements. But even those assignments come at a cost: the days we ask a reporter to go to ski areas and work on stories promoting deep powder and carb-rich alpine cuisine are days he or she can’t be watch-dogging city hall. But the more pernicious problem is how the traditional business model inevitably erodes the independence and objectivity that consistently good journalism requires. This isn’t just code for the Spokesman-Review and River Park Square, although I’ll concede it’s a terrific example how a newspaper can lose its soul and its credibility. But it isn’t just newspapers. When public radio and television stations accept corporate underwriting to help pay their bills, it creates an obvious disincentive to do aggressive, public interest reporting that would offend the interests of the underwriter(s).
Look again at how the Columbia Journalism Review’s Dean Starkman pithily summarized the lapse of the business press in the Wall Street meltdown: “The business press exists within the Wall Street and corporate subculture and understandably must adopt its idioms and customs, the better to translate them for the rest of us. Still, it relies on those institutions for its stories. Burning a bridge is hard. It is far easier for news bureaucracies to accept ever-narrowing frames of discourse, frames forcefully pushed by industry, even if those frames marginalize and eventually exclude the business press’s own great investigative traditions.”
I think most of you caught the same thing I did. If we put journalists in a position where they “understandably must adopt” the “idioms and customs” of those they’re reporting on, then what we have is a major design flaw. We are essentially asking reporters to choose between their jobs and their ethics.
This is not an academic point. The havoc of the Wall Street meltdown should make everyone cringe and, I would hope, realize that we all have a stake in quality journalism that is inspired by the public interest. The people responsible for the “meltdown” of the American economy didn’t just pull the wrong lever at a nuclear power station, they actually worked diligently and expensively for years to remove government regulation of their practices and to banish those, like former Commodities Future Trading Commission chairwoman Brooksley Born, who saw the public need for new and tougher regulation. And now, because so many of the players are too big to fail without bringing the whole system down, the taxpayers are on the hook even as millions lose their jobs, and the rest of us live in fear of losing our jobs.
So, I ask you, when the politicians were being bought off and the regulators silenced, just who was going to tell the people?
I can’t prove that a corps of journalists working under a different model could have prevented the Wall Street debacle. All I know is what Starkman concludes, that the system of journalism we have failed to tell the story and became part of the problem.
I’ll humbly admit I don’t know what the answer is. There are promising projects like Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo website that, though relatively small, have demonstrated they can put together powerful original reporting. TPM, in case you haven’t heard of them, is where the heavy digging on Alberto Gonzales and the U.S. Attorney scandal was done. Last year, that work earned Marshall a George Polk Award, one of journalism’s most prestigious prizes. TPM’s business model was to first attract an audience, then ask that audience for financial support, and then mix in advertising revenues.
My guess (and my hope) is that it is people like Marshall, who love journalism, who will rise to fill the vacuum created by the decline of newspapers. They’ll find a way to do it and, along the way, a new economic model for journalism will evolve.
–Tim Connor