Dan’s post earlier today about an ad on the front page of the New York Times brings to the fore what might be a new way to think about the coming transformations of our journalistic/media landscape, which people alternately see as The End of the World as We Know it or the Brave New World in an un-ironic sense.
In short, forget about the mythology of journalists as crusaders for the truth, seeking to promote democracy by keeping a vigilant eye on those in power. Yeah, newspapers do that, but they only do that so long as they can sell enough ads to pay the salaries of the reporters and editors and photographers. As one journalist friend told my students when visiting class, “Newspapers are in the business of selling newspapers, not saving the world.” But that’s not entirely accurate either: newspapers have never paid for themselves with the coin slapped into the blind newsie’s hand by daily readers: circulation is just a number used for setting ad rates, and the newshole is the space left over after ads are sold, not the raison d’etre of the enterprise.
Whatever the future of journalism, online or dead tree, holds, it will be all about the ads.
But that’s true of our entire flow of information, entertainment and news. TV? All those great shows, and all those shitty ones, exist only if their ratings are high enough to sell ads. Radio? Ads. (This includes local TV and radio news operations too.) Internet? Money-making sites are the ones which can sell the most ads. Remember when cable TV was new, up-and-coming? One of the selling points to get subscribers was “No commercials! You’ll pay for TV directly, and won’t have to sit through boring commercials all the time!” That lasted no time at all, and except for the few high-end pay channels, cable is ads ads ads. (Exception to the rule: Sirius and other satellite radio stations do make it on subscribers for their music channels, but there are ads on their news and talk stations.)
Big time sports? Ad revenue from sponsors, in the stadia and (already in some sports, eventually in others) on uniforms. Most high-end theatre depends on sponsorship from corporate interests, which are just polite, low-key ads. Movies might be the only major exception to this rule. But if you look around at the modern western world, everything we consume—intellectually as well as physically—is held up by a rickety scaffold of people trying to get you to buy stuff from them: ads make everything possible.
So, what is to come? After the jump . . .
I know plenty of websites which celebrate the coming death of old media, while constantly linking to the newspapers they excoriate (no links for them!). One particular Chicago-police blog continually complains about the stupidity and blindness of the local columnists, while constantly linking the news stories which prove their point. Well, you really cannot have it both ways: you cannot say newspapers are idiotic, not worth your fifty cents, because they don’t agree with your politics, and then use things the newspapers print to support your own points. Not for long, anyway.
What will we lose once the local daily newspaper is dead?
We will lose investigative reporters and editors who make a good living doing long-term work. (As well as features writers, though I think arts journalism is a different beast.) Citizen journalists can and have exposed official corruption and so forth, but nothing beats ten or twenty or thirty years on a beat, building contacts, maintaining an institutional memory, knowing where the bodies are buried and who brought the shovel. If we rely on unpaid enthusiasts to do this kind of work, we are going to be more and more bamboozled all the time, as freelance citizen journalists don’t have the time or, usually, the expertise to the long-term digging that exposes things like Watergate. Politicians HATE newspapers, and justly so, and so people who don’t trust politicians should love them.
On the national level, we will lose the first draft of history. Picture the Bush Administration (painful, I know, but try): a complacent and bought-off corporate media structure selling the war in Iraq. But the same structure kept reporting, and eventually even the Knucklehead-in-Chief had to deal with some aspects of reality by increasing the number of troops to meet the actual, you know, reality on the ground. Now, subtract all that print media coverage. Bush appears, tells us WMDs, off we go to War. No follow-up. Plamegate? Never exposed. No Judith Miller losing her fucking job and going to jail.
I suspect the final answer will be some combination of a national paper or two—the New York Times, the Washington Post, and once upon a time I thought (before the Tribune bought and wrecked them) the LA Times. These papers would have a local section, staffed in place and paid for by local ad revenues, and some share of national ads, and local newsstand sales and subscriptions. These reporters and editors would probably be less well-paid and less secure than reporters and editors of the recent past, or even the current melt-down. And the national political news, and all overseas coverage, will come from fewer and fewer voices. The quantity and quality of information we have access to will decrease, and the decisions we make as citizens will therefore be likelier to be made upon insufficient or downright false information.
Picture Hurricane Katrina without CNN’s coverage. John McCain might be President-elect if that had happened, and the Republicans might still control Congress.
That’s what the world will be like if daily newspapers die off. It’s not just the curmudgeons who like their daily comics and crossword puzzles on newsprint: it’s our civic and political discourse at stake here.
I’m trying to see a correlation between clean government and daily newspapers and it isn’t working for me. Take Chicago for example…
Would a blogger have uncovered Watergate? Iran-Contra?
If he or she did, would it have been enough to get congressional investigation? Or would it simply be waved away as “politically motivated punditry.”
What will lose with newspapers? The Ben Bradlees and Katherine Grahams of the world. In addition to the investigative reporter, we’ll lose the editor and the “institution” of a newspaper.
This is as sad as polar bears drowning. If you think government is dirty in spite of the dailies, how much dirtier when they’re gone.
You mean the crack media that sold us W as honest and Gore as a liar? The news media that went right along with the Iraq war? American news pros have virtually covered themselves with gasoline and set themselves afire. Where is the accountability and where are the mass resignations? They’re as bad as the corrupt Wall Street-regulation nexus. The first draft of history for the W era! Future media historians will shudder. Can I write a check to the BBC?
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
BBC is a good case in point: they don’t need to sell ads because they’re government supported. You think the corporate media was compliant to Bush, imagine if he’d actually fucking owned them.
maybe if we a had a newspaper here like the guardian, the other corporate and less-corporate (pbs) media would have a space to push back. kind of like msnbc’s decision now with their prime-time lineup. (although i’m not a huge olbermann fan. also, remember ashley banfield?). maybe some newspaper might want to follow msnbc’s lead.
They told us when cable first became available it would be commercial free. That lasted…not.
The interesting thing about the BBC is that they are so independent of the government, even though that’s where the funding comes from. Its similar to the divide betwen news and advertising in newspapers – even though the ship is sinking, they still won’t cross that line.
Also, the relatively high standards from the BBC force the independent stations to keep their standards up too. There are four ad breaks an hour, not like in the USA where its teaser, ads, opening credits, more ads, little bit of show, ads again, some more show, ads, closing credits, even more fucking ads, scenes from the next episode, ads, ads, ads, ads, ads.
Like it or not, there are a whole bunch of people essentially writing for free on blogs and those people seem willing to the heavy lifting of investigative reporting by filing FOIA paperwork, searching old magazines and newspapers, hunting through used bookstores for out of print books, taking their digital cameras around and capturing first hand protests, crimes, the happiness and horror of day to day life.
I disagree with your premise that these people don’t have the expertise to do this type of investigative work. Some of them are more qualified than today’s batch of “journalists.”
Do we need the filter of traditional news sources to sort through and give us the stories they think are important while ignoring things that don’t fit their agenda? Are we better informed this way, or are we less informed because we buy the company line and don’t take the time to look further? Does a filter make it easier to manipulate people? Abso-fucking-lutely.
Granted I studied journalism a long time ago now, but when I studied it there was still a distinction between news and features and ethics was still taken seriously as a concept. In the last ten years we’ve seen all that was “journalism” blown away and its demise was cemented in this year’s election process.
How journalism gets defined and rebuilt over the next several years remains to be seen. Don’t count out the idea of the government “bailing out” the old media, but in this case the old media becomes like BBC or in some people’s minds Pravda. Will Congress pass a “Fairness Doctrine”? And if so, what effect will that have on blogs both conservative and liberal?
I don’t have answers but I do mourn the loss of good local coverage. I am grateful that the Stranger is still reviewing local restaurants and arts events and covering local news. The Stranger reporting is biased as well, but when I pick up a free alternative news weekly I know that going into it vs. when I pick up the New York Times I used to expect something different…
Blame Craigslist for taking away the classifieds, which were a huge portion of papers’ revenue. Really. Blame Craigslist.
Chicago Fan, for your argument to work, you can’t use reporting examples drawn from CNN or the New York Times. The NYT and Wall Street Journal and Washington Post and USA Today will benefit from the death of crappy small-city dailies. You have to say why it will be terrible when the Seattle Times and the Denver Post and papers like that cease to exist.
As for investigative reporting, Seymour Hersh is far from the only example, just the first that came to mind, of great work done outside the institution of a daily newspaper. Don’t assume the decline of a medium necessitates the death of a trade.
Just because they’re (again, which they did for MOST OF THEIR HISTORY) putting ads on the front page of the NY Times (and if they had any guts, the Seattle Suburban Times), doesn’t mean it’s the end of the daily paper.
Jacking the price up to 75 cents might, though.
Papers should compete better for ads like classifieds and stop doing stupid things like not charging EXTRA for sports sections to be added to the paper (which allows the rest of us not to read it and saves trees).
That said, most kids don’t read the paper.
Want to know why? Cause they keep shrinking the comics and printing less. Which is the dumbest thing EVER to be doing.
Yikes @#5. The quickest way to make me stop reading your slog or paper or watching your tv show (I don’t watch tv) is to add a VERY annoying ad on it.
http://www.youtube.com/v/bi2RJdKTHC0&hl=…
You are going to have to wake up to the fact that they have control over your mind and stop feeding that which is enslaving you. Just reading the various slog comments for today it is abundantly clear. For those of us not under the control of television and the media owners…the task before us is daunting. VERY DAUNTING!
http://www.awalkwithgonzo.blogspot.com
I see advertisement for AT&T I think slavery. I see an add for Exxon I think war. I see an ad for Gap I think child slavery. I see an ad for CBS I think mind control/propaganda. FREE YOUR MIND> Stop supporting that which is enslaving you! Wake up!
Daily newspapers need not die. They’ll just end up converting to news web sites. They all have web sites already where they post their content, the only thing left to do is cancel the dead tree edition.