The Newspaper Dilemma

MONDAY, MARCH 31 2008

Are newspapers riding off into the sunset?

Many of you might be familiar with the recent article written by Eric Alterman on the New Yorker website. OUT OF PRINT: The death and life of the American newspaper.

I heard about this on a tech podcast called TWIT or This Week in Tech. The team discussed an article written about the demise of the newspaper industry due to the ease at which anyone can go on the internet and the instantaneous availability of breaking news.

This caught my attention, not only as an employee of a newspaper but as an American. The morning paper has been a tradition for hundreds of years, and for people to predict its death is cause for worry. Maybe you think that technology is taking over and the paper is just a casualty of war but I think that many are overlooking the significance of the local newspaper. True you can get all the information you could ever want by nosing through CNN.com or other news sources but not local news. That is the key, with the spread of electronic communication the community has suffered the most. Community has become more synonymous with the the digital world rather than a PTA meeting or local sporting event. Human contact has been reduced to sending messages over Instant Messenger or email to the point where we now rely on the internet to find a mate.

Everything has to reach an extreme, and once that happens, the moment the proverbial line is crossed, we can finally take a step back and logically analyze where mistakes were made. Blogging has become so popular and wide-spread that information that is passed down the line slowly degrades like passing messages down a junior high lunch table. It is our job as observers to pick out which ones we can trust. You can choose not to trust me, which is fine. I think a lot of bloggers post simply to visually hear themselves talk. Currently the world is in a state of transition. We must learn to find a median in our digital and physical lives. Humanity must develop the ability to realize where ease of use ends and neglect begins.

Maybe it's my fear of robot overlords enslaving humanity but I doubt that newspapers will ever become extinct. For one, what do you do when the power goes out? You can't surf the internet to see if people in Africa have adopted Brittany Spears' children because they fear for their well-being. All I'm saying is, as long as we continue to build cities in areas that are otherwise uninhabitable (i.e. Las Vegas) resources will run out. It'll be bad news. Dogs and cats living together ... mass hysteria.

Here are some of excerpts from the story that I personally found important. Please check out the original in its entirety at:
www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/31/080331fa_fact_alterman

- "The columnist Molly Ivins complained, shortly before her death, that the newspaper companies’ solution to their problem was to make “our product smaller and less helpful and less interesting.” That may help explain why the dwindling number of Americans who buy and read a daily paper are spending less time with it; the average is down to less than fifteen hours a month. Only nineteen per cent of Americans between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four claim even to look at a daily newspaper. The average age of the American newspaper reader is fifty-five and rising."

- "It is a point of ironic injustice, perhaps, that when a reader surfs the Web in search of political news he frequently ends up at a site that is merely aggregating journalistic work that originated in a newspaper, but that fact is not likely to save any newspaper jobs or increase papers’ stock valuation."

- "The Huffington Post’s editorial processes are based on what Peretti has named the “mullet strategy.” (“Business up front, party in the back” is how his trend-spotting site BuzzFeed glosses it.) “User-generated content is all the rage, but most of it totally sucks,” Peretti says. The mullet strategy invites users to “argue and vent on the secondary pages, but professional editors keep the front page looking sharp."

- "Newspapers are dying; the evidence of diminishment in economic vitality, editorial quality, depth, personnel, and the over-all number of papers is everywhere."

The newspaper industry can try and play catch-up by creating their own websites where news can be updated constantly and community participation is encouraged. Another option is to take a literal step back and look at themselves through their readers eyes. When others take away, local newspapers need to offer more, on a smaller scale.

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