by Michael S. Malone
What Americans need right now is a good government-subsidized obituary.
You probably didn’t read the story – because what red-blooded American reads a newspaper anymore? – but apparently the nation’s newspapers, having already lost their editorial dominance to cable news and the Web, their sports coverage to fan sites, their classifieds to Craigslist, and their editorial pages to the blogosphere, are now under heavy assault on their last profitable redoubt: the obituary page.
The story, from the Wire Service That Shall Not Be Quoted, reports that a new study by Northwestern University finds that social networks and on-line memorials are increasingly taking the place of that old print stand-by. This, of course, is shocking news: given the average age of today’s typical newspaper reader, the obituary page is likely the first and only one they read over their bowls of stewed prunes.
Thus, and for good reason, the Northwestern researchers recommend that newspapers not cut back on either those pages or the staff who produce them. To that strategy, one can only say: fat chance.
I’m not trying to be cynical about all of this. I am, after all, a fourth generation newspaperman, with my oldest, Tad, now a fifth. But over the last decade, the newspaper industry has made so many dumb strategic decisions, so obstinately refused to accept reality, and so arrogantly ignored advice from others who have survived similar technological revolutions — that there is a certain rough justice to what is happening to it right now.
That said, I don’t wish this ugly fate on newspapers – nor do I think most people do. No, it’s actually much worse than that: I find I don’t really care that much anymore. I think there is a kind of Kubler-Ross mourning cycle for obsolete technologies as well. First, we decry the loss of something that was so integral to our lives. Then, we sense that it is becoming something of a personal and social burden. Then, at last, we make the break and move on to the new technology – but we still retain a residual affection to what was so important to us. Finally, we grow tired of hearing about the troubles of that old technology, blame it for creating its own problems, and wish it would go away.
That’s how I feel about desktop computers, impact printers, fax machines, analog television, CDs, carburetors . . .and, increasingly, newspapers. I do feel a bit guilty about this attitude – like I’m betraying both my ancestors and those thousand or so yellowing clips with my by-line on them moldering away in a closet – but frankly, I’m too busy to even feel much of that.
Of course, there are some folks who are deeply concerned about the fate of newspapers: incumbent politicians. Most of them still see newspapers as a crucial source of news coverage of all of their fine work, and as a source of endorsements they can put on their campaign fliers. And, of course, most major dailies are also unionized, and thus more than deserving of a bail-out (Other than banks, do the Feds ever bail out industries that are non-union or not obsolete?) Hence the calls for a bailout of the nation’s newspapers, essentially giving the government oversight to assure newspapers retain their financial and editorial independence.
Yeah, that’s going to work. The idea is so risible that only a politician could promote it with a straight face. And it just might happen too, because Congress has shown a remarkable ability to get bills passed while everyone else is laughing at the sheer logical absurdity of the legislation (i.e., spending your way out of debt). Should that day come, and the free, government-mandated newspaper arrives on our porches demanding to be read, you can be sure that the obituary page will be both sizable, and mercifully free of all of those newly-deceased who happened to vote the wrong way in the last election.
Years ago, I was one of the very first people to predict the current crisis in newspapers, I also forecast that by the end of this decade, most of the major newspaper dailies in the U.S. would be dead or dying, with only a few big players (the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today, among them) left. I also predicted that they would then serve as national newspapers, scooping up smaller regional and local papers to serve as their metro sections in each region.
“What I mean by the last is that newspapers (and even more obviously, troubled national newsmagazines like Newsweek) have essentially abandoned the news business and gone into the comfort business.”
That’s an excellent insight. I will have to think about that for awhile.
Accouncing the passing of a love one via a newspaper is gettinng less and less effective, with fewer and fewer people reading the paper.
Yes, it is sad to see this but I do not feel sorry for them because of the “biased” positions most of them have taken over the past few years. Plus the Internet is “Progressive News”. Progressive in it’s form that the regular citizen can put input into the story by he’s/her’s comments. Of course, more and more “Blogs” are out there passing on news throughout the Internet…It’s real time interaction..Newspapers have to be less “biased” and follow the original creed I thought all Journalists have taken…or maybe not! It’s too bad becasue of written history will be in data bytes instead of physical paper…
What’s happening is that a core structure of investigative, fact checking, and neutral (enough) journalism is disintegrating, and in its place is a growing Tower of Babel of Disinformation. One could spend an entire day bouncing between “news” and opinion sites and yet end up with less actual knowledge about what’s really going on in the world. There can’t be much of “Free Press” if there aren’t any “Real Press” left.
Mr Thompson, the biggest problem with the media today is that THEY ARE NO LONGER JOURNALISTS. They are PROPAGANDA artists. Most of the media today is no different than the Nazis under Joseph Goebbels, or the Soviet “media” of Pravda and Tass, nothing more than mouthpieces for there failed ideology. The media today does everything in there power to promote MARXIST, COMMUNIST IDEOLOGY over the dissemination of true news stories. Sarah Palin, a mother of 5, is a bigger threat than Ayman al Zawahiri? According to most of the media she is. Rush Limbaugh, a talk show host, has more power than Nasty the Bolshevik sleazer of the house? Maybe some commielib can tell me what laws Limbaugh,Hannity, Beck, Fox News, have passed lately? By the way-maybe we can check the collective IQs of MSNBCs prime time lineup. These folks define a lifetime subscription to being stuck on stupid.
Since when were newspapers independent?
I reiterate, the bulk of newspapers tread the path trod by Sidney Hook, who accused Mortimer Adler of promoting a new medievalism when Adler charged that “We have more to fear from our professors than from Hitler”, when Adler was referring to those intellectuals who had abandoned historically accepted moral truths.
What you have left out — conservatives are no longer “allowed” in the media — they are bullied out of it.
Otherwise a great article — except that younger people are never going to pay to read a “newspaper” on the web. Just visit a college classroom and ask them.
Take a look at this about Mortimer Adler: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,967533,00.html
You blame technology, I blame the Supreme Court. Without the expansion of the 1st amendment into areas the fonders did not intend it to cover, such as “expression”, newspapers would have a fighting chance today.
Expression as a social concept pre-dates the Constitution by about 2 generations (30-40 years). If the founders had wanted “expression” covered they would have included it in the 1st amendment. It is there because it wasn’t intended to be there, not because of an oversight.
With no 1st amendment protection, the Media woul be constrained, by lawsuit if nothing else. Then there would have to be a constitutional amendment passed to give the ‘Media” protection. That process could be used to curb some of the media excesses right from the start. Cut back on the propaganda.
As FOX has shown, a steady diet of slanted news turns most people off. They then go away and won’t come back without a really good reason.
The really funny thing is that I used to fact check my internet reading by going to the print media and searching for their take on the subject. The print media might have been slower, but it usually had a better credibility on many issues up to about 8 years ago. That was when Bush Derangement Syndrome did not exist or was reserved for the far left only. Slowly at first, I started finding that what the media reported on was incorrect, slight differences from online sources, but it was obvious that the print media was wrong. Then it started hitting a rapid pace of being so completely biased or just plain wrong that I knew there was something wrong with the printed media’s reporting and started fact checking the print media against the internet posts. By 2005 print media had lost almost every single issue I had checked and now the only reason for checking print media sources is so that I can get into their comments section and warn the readers that what they are reading is trash and then give as close to true information I can. There really is not a print media out there that I trust anymore. Science Journals are tarnished, newspapers as well as periodical magazines are completely biased and incapable of telling fact from fiction even in the extraordinarily rare instance that they are even trying to be honest.
Other print sources I have stopped buying because of liberal bias are comics. You can no longer find any comics that actually promote American Values.
The liberal Houston Chronicle is my local newspaper. I refuse to subscribe to it. Nevertheless, it will survive in some sort of undefined manner. The Chronicle and others like it will have to migrate to the Internet. The dead wood version will probably disappear within the next five years. It will also have to exclusively focus on local politics, cultural events, sports, and maybe a recipe or two. Nobody will be interested in the Chronicle’s attempts at “serious journalism” There will rarely be any justification to send anyone outside of the city. The management will almost never approve of airplane trips and overnight lodgings. Off the top of my head, I suspect that the whole staff will be comprised of less than one hundred people—and perhaps only fifty. The salaries will be relatively modest, and a couple of people might earn a six-figure income. These papers will indeed be much humbler versions of their former selves.
If you really want to know about the news media read Bias by Goldberg. One of the most interesting things he had to say was that journalist go to the same schools, are taught by the same professors, work in the same environment, live in the same communities.
When they say “No one I know thinks that….or feels that way………or believes that, they are telling the literal truth. No one they know does. Group think and tunnel vision.
Change!
Newsweek now pathetic; let my subscription to TIME lapse. Been months now and it keeps sending me special offers to return.
Nice piece, as always.
Great article.
Unfortunately I think the non-coverage of red hot stories is more sinister than you let on. It’s not that the NY Times and two or three papers ignore them, it’s the fact that they all ignore them, including networks.
One incident that occurred last summer at the LA Times is scary. One of the blog editors ran a piece on the John Edwards and Rielle Hunter shenanigans which the industry was ignoring. After the blog piece was up for several hours, the blog editor was emailed (leaked to a media blog) by the Times Executive Editor to take the piece and all comments down, and not report on the subject. This is more tham groupthink, it is enforced groupthink.
Quite frankly these papers deserve what is happening to them. They have aliented half their audience.
Astonerii:
For a good cartoon, try Day by Day, written by Chris Muir. On the internet, very funny, and very pointed. F
Stewed prunes. Priceless.
The problem is, of course, that one wants to be notable (or notorious) enough to rate a Mark Steyn obituary, but then you croak knowing you’re not going to be able to read it, which makes dying that much more painful…
I met Mortimer Adler, I talked to Mortimer Adler, Mortimer Adler was an acquaintance of mine and you, Mr. Malone, are no Mortimer Adler!
Adler, by the way, converted to Christianity shortly before his death; after accepting intellectually the existence of God some years earlier….interesting story.
Interesting analysis of the newspaper biz… ; but I disagree with you on the blame you place on rotten management by paper owners.
From the inside, it doesn’t look like that. I think the onset of the Internet caught everyone by surprise, with everything going out free in a rush, and craigslist taking up so much of the classified ads biz, the biz model just broke fast with no practical way to replace it.
It seems to me everything was tried by somebody and none of it worked much. There was no way to keep all the info from getting out free on the internet, I don’t think.
There’s no doubt that papers had gotten fat and sassy by the early 1990s, making 25 to 40 percent profit. But the monopoly they owned on gathering and disseminating news and information just disappeared quickly, not really anyone’s fault, and so then, did the big profits.
I don’t see anything anyone could have done to change it… except for the specialty pubs, like the Wall Street Journal, which with unique and high-value info can charge for it.
The one franchise left for most papers is the local news one; for whatever it’s worth, which depends a lot on the specific locale of the paper.
And FWIW, the dynamic you describe on why newsrooms don’t cover certain stories, to “protect” their readers’ sensibilities, can’t be true, I don’t think. It just doesn’t happen that way.
Some of it is laziness, some is the group think of most journos being Lefties, so they all have the same interests, don’t have certain curiosities… I’m sure at the NYTimes and a few places, some of the stories, on Edwards, and such, aren’t seen as news partly because of political bias, maybe more indirect that direct bias: any such story on a guy like Edwards is found boring and unnecessary by Lefties; if it was a rightwing preacher, wow, big story.
The decimation of newsrooms is a factor, too, although that can sound like a cheap excuse: in general journalists feel they just have no time to take on big new projects, too busy just keeping up with the grind of daily news…; two decades ago, every medium to large newsroom was filled with reporters sitting around try ing to think up stuff to write about, investigate, cover; now, there isn’t that slack, fatness, available to turn on some big new thing….it does affect coverage, I’m convinced.
I also think there’s a generational loss of knowledge, wider reading, interests, basic curiousity;
one colleague also points out the general fact that journalism is, by definition, inefficient.. you sort of have to have lots of reporters hanging out, not doing much, waiting for the trial to get over, the crime scene to clear, .. as one old horse described it, mostly loafing and gossip.
The fact that for a bright shining moment in the 20th century there got to be big money in doing it maybe was more of an historical accident of history, ala why advertising worked so well for a while. who knows?
Yes, the mainly leftish MSM has alienated many of their readers, partly because of real and perceived bias. but I don’t think that’s really a major factor in the break down of the biz model. Conservative papers, what there are of them, also aren’t making as much money as they once did, or some not at all… Washington Times and NYPost, I believe, lose lots of money.
It appears many small to medium dailies still are making money, albeit not as much as they used to make.
Thanks to the internet, every newspaper has many more readers now than during the hey days of 15 to 20 years ago, worldwide readers even for small dailies in Podunksville. But there’s little or no revenue coming from such readers.
There’s also a billing problem, along with the other problems in figuring out how to make money on the internet; $3 or $2 is too much to charge for hitting a Web site, but 3 cents, or a nickel, or something, seems fair to me as a reader… but many say there’s no efficient way of collecting such small fees yet electronically…..
Oh – you know – the newspapers could PRINT THE NEWS. Or at least *something* worth reading.
Radical idea, I know.
IMO newspapers didn’t die because of PC (even though that may be the last symptom of a long decline) but rather when they decided that the income would come from advertisers rather than from charging people to read the paper ( and thus being motivated to make the papers something people would in fact pay to read.)
In older times the papers not only published the events of the day, but also poems, short stories, essays on topics of public interest – in other words a wide assortment of things that might interest the entire family suitable for reading at the breakfast table or indeed after dinner. There were things to enjoy alone and things to chat about with others.
Now? Ads ads ads – 3/4 ads or more, with a thin cover of ‘story’ even more thinly disguised as ‘news’. Now that technology has assured that the words on the papers are a day or more behind what is ‘new’ – why on earth would anyone WANT to pay to read someone elses merchandising?
Hello Mike: Newspapers: what are they? Well people used to wrap fish in them. You always have such good ideas. I don’t mean “fish wrapping”. That was my idea.
Excellent comment and analysis Annie B.
It’s nothing to do with technology. It’s simply that the majority of people are good at getting a sense of value.
When you spend a couple of dollars to find you’ve had whatever was of interest between the ads and sports covered in 15 minutes or less: when you know of events first hand then see the slant put on them when printed: worse of all, when you see the disgusting bias towards socialism and the socialist parties, and the descent to pure evil of the things said about people like Ron Paul or Sarah Palin for example: when any comment in the readers comments section that you send in is moderated out if doesnt follow the socialist “progressive” line: when the world can be falling apart over a scandal that could cause us to be taxed to oblivion (climategate) but all the papers can do is warble on about a golf players personal aberrations – well, then you decide this is “so much crap” toss the thing in the bin, and decide to spend your few dollars on something else.
Here in Australia (where it’s just as bad if not worse) I got to getting the odd one for lighting house fires. Then they made it fire-retardant, and it stank too highly of chemicals to use for the cat tray. !!!!
Dont ever get a single one now.
Like any other business, if they had a good quality product, people would pay for it. The fact is, they don’t.
I’ll give an example. For over 40 years, I read The Economist magazine. I never missed an issue, read it cover to cover. They had credibility, a relatively high intellectual level, & often had some witty & clever humour. Over the years, & recently, at an accelerated rate, there was a serious decline in quality. Politically correct bias began creeping into reports.
In one specific area, Middle-East reporting, their analyses went to hell altogether, becoming little more than propaganda. Their gradually increasing anti-Israel bias, disdain for factual objective reporting, the one-sided presentations of issues, the lack of historical context in reporting events, this destroyed their credibility in my eyes. And, if their reporting was so biased in this case, then why should I believe anything else they reported on?
So, after over 40 yrs as a paying customer, I stopped buying the magazine. They became irrelevent.
Today, I no longer read the NYT, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, The Times of London, The Financial Times (UK), nor do I care much about television news (I watch Fox on occasion).
After reading more of the comments, especially from the one who was “inside looking out,” I have this to say: a serious problem is that the journalists at newspapers isolate themselves from the rest of the country. I worked for the Associated Press for a short time — the most exclusive club in journalism. Most of their journalists spend most of their time behind a desk, staring at a computer rather than interacting with real live people. And yet the journalists at AP are considered the most “qualified” journalists in the country. And that’s the way it was 15 years ago. It’s worse now. Journalism is about PEOPLE. If the PEOPLE are no longer important in a newsroom, the PEOPLE are going to stop reading the paper. That’s why I learned after two decades in the biz. TV news casters — Fox in particular — have a better handle on how to relate to PEOPLE. That’s why they’re so successful.
M.A. Lewis: You’re right about the isolation of journalists from general society. It’s an occupational hazard, a combination of the kind of work often demanded (it’s much more ‘efficient’ to work the phones from a desk and write, than to traipse all over actually being on the scenes of news events, for example, especially in the world of diminished profits)and the nature of the job, of being an observer, keeping objective distance, not an actor. So journalists tend not to be joiners, it seems. And they are overwhelmingly, for whatever reasons, on the Left, politically, and unbelievers, religiously, ( so they will all go to hell eventually, if that cheers you up.)
But I can’t believe you think TV broadcasters, “news readers,” are more regular people.. come on.. they make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and hours a day looking at themselves in the mirror.
Part of the isolation came from the professionalization of the journalism trade the past 50 years or so, I think. It got journos better pay, which contributed to the high-cost newsrooms that now have been dismantled.
I heard Pulitzer-Prize winninng former reporter John Camp, who writes the Minnesota detective “….Prey” novels as John Sandford, talk about how newspapers used to get all those great, graphic crime and accident photos in the paper in the 1930s, 40s, 50s; we wouldn’t publish most of them today because of our sensitivities,,, but he said back then part of the reason papers got them was that they hired so many photographers because they paid them little, so they were all over the place, hanging out, getting to murder and accident death scenes before the cops and capturing the poignant and bloody images.
But while I agree there are problems of bias, etc, in the MSM, much of this angry criticism of newspapers I think is way over the top, and fails to recognize the great work that does go on by most papers and by the now shrinking AP, in thankless coverage of boring government meetings and legislatures that are important, and for the great part, keeping partisanship and bias out of the reporting… sure, the activist groups know how to work the press and get their day, and there are areas of bias, but in many respects I think the professionalism in journalism has made it much better, if maybe less exciting, dramatic and fun to read, than it was for most of, say, America’s history.
For all the scandals of some of the liars and plagiarists caught at the NYTimes, the New Republic and the Washington Post in recent years, the chief fact of it all is their rarity, although even one, for any paper, is too many.
Even for conservatives, isn’t the NYTimes still a wonder, that they come out with that many words every day; on Sunday, surely everyone can find several things of great interest in the old grey lady…no?
And the same conservatives, if they read the Washington Times, while there’s some fine journalists there, must feel a little weird and put off by the strange and rather secret role of the Moonie ownership, no?
It’s great that the new Web world allows readers to hold newspapers accountable in ways that were impossible only 10 years ago.
My big question for all the angry critics of newspapers, who want them to die a slow, painful death: America has never been without newspaper; why are you so confident it will be a good thing if they disappear?
Doesn’t sound very conservative to me.
Don’t you at least like the funnies?
Edmund Burke, shy as he was, couldn’t get up and do what needed to be done very morning without his newspaper, you know.
I think working for the Wall St. Journal is a more exclusive club than The AP, by the way.
I wonder how much Fox News makes, too; might not be in black ink; many of Murdoch’s news organs don’t.
> … shrink down to a strong, permanent core of really good editors
> and then surround that core with a ‘cloud’ of hundreds, even
> thousands, of freelance reporters — some nearly permanent, others
> one-timers – and then construct the ‘paper’ in real time, with
> breaking local, national and international news. Make the paper
> web-based, multi-media, constantly updated 24/7/365 and scalable
> (i.e., stories as long as they need to be), and accessible from
> all digital platforms.
We already have that. It’s called the blogosphere. Isn’t Glenn Reynolds one of those editors? Isn’t Matt Drudge? Kos? Huffington? Aren’t those freelance reporters the small blogs those guys link to?
Also consider the impact of the free (usually weekly) newspapers which exist in just about every city…almost always published by people of the pseudo-hippie persuasion. These publications provide coverage of local entertainment, restaurants, sometimes local politics…and hence, remove one more set of reasons for subscribing to the local paid daily.
Interesting comments, nodakboy.
re the WSJ being unique and high value, I look forward to reading it every day, and prefer the print version to online. The eye can scan several articles on a printed page and take in as much info as desired, unlike a web page which can only display headlines in sequence. To find out what’s behind the headline, you have to click on it — too time consuming.
“The one franchise left for most papers is the local news one; for whatever it’s worth, which depends a lot on the specific locale of the paper.” Yes. I’d be devastated if my small town newspaper went under.
Good point about the NY Post & the Washington Times losing money too.
Finally, this point nails it: “…there’s a generational loss of knowledge, wider reading, interests, basic curiousity;” I see it not only in young potential newspaper customers, but also in young newspaper reporters.
As one who has spent 35 years working on newspapers, I still think that most of the obituaries for newspapers are premature. Yes, newspapers have struggled with the Internet. Yes, a liberal bias seems to exist in the newsrooms of most big city dailies, mostly as a result of group think and common backgrounds and education. Yes, we haven’t found an on-line economic model that works.
But, what all of you are saying is that you want more facts and less commentary in the news columns. The fact remains that without newspaper news rooms, there would be precious little news worthy of comment left to print. They will survive.
One thing barely touched on in this discussion is that most of the problems are with the metro dailies. Many weeklies and small town dailies continue to thrive. If the recession ever ends, I think even big-city newspapers will flourish again.
It’s a gross exaggeration to say “no young people” or “only old people” read newspapers. The free newspaper I work on has 92 percent readership in the community we serve, according to an independent audit. That percentage can’t all be old folks.
For many years, I subscribed to Newsweek. Finally, in spite of George Will’s column, I got fed up with the liberal bias, and switched to Time. Same thing. Then somebody gave me a free subscription to “The Week.” I find myself picking it up for one reason — I learn things I didn’t know before. I’m not a shill for the magazine. It doesn’t have enough advertising to sustain itself, I don’t think, and it is giving out so many free subs that I wonder how it can ever convince enough people to pay. But the point is, people will read news that is relevant to their lives and tells them things that they don’t already know.
Particularly, people want to hear news about people they know. On the Web site of our rural weekly, the most hits come on the Society section, because people want to know about births, engagements, marriages and anniversaries, and that is followed closely by the Obits, because they want to know who died.
They don’t want to read about gay rights unless it hits them where they live — like the votes that the ELCA congregations have been taking on whether to stay or leave the synod. Abortion, the same way. Intensely important though these issues may be to some, they don’t affect most people in their everyday lives. Most readers don’t want to be pummeled with politics every day; they will read the city council story only if it seems relevant. They just want to know what their friends, neighbors and acquaintances are up to. When the big city dailies populated their newsrooms with global sophisticates, that’s when the trouble began. In case you’ve forgotten, their declining readership began about 30 years ago, long before the Internet took off.
We, personally, have always depended on the newspapers and the evening news on our local stations to show us the news. We looked at it in a non-questioning way. It was what it was. Now, things have changed to the point that we must wade through the muck to even come close to the “unbiased” story.
I would like to see, hear, more truth, not their “version” of the truth. If the gov bails them out, they will not be worth reading or the paper they are printed on…oh, right, that’ where they are now,so what’s the point?
We mainly watch FOX. FOX needs a spanis speaing station.
Mr. Malone is essentially correct, and his view of the printed newspaper of the future seems to be the one viable business model. But, he only hinted at the real value of a newspaper. He noted papers are the true source of actual reporting. Other media borrow from it. Print journalists of the future can endure only if they can be counted on to inform their publics — whomever those might be — truthfully and fully. Comment and opinion are more enticing than facts. Yet, without facts, comments and opinions are for nothing. Newspapers supported by small audiences willing to pay for good products are necessary for useful communication. Useful communication is the foundation of a workable democratic republic. Society needs objective journalism. Sure it is an ideal, but there must be enough men and women extant in a demographic driven marketing culture to strive for that ideal. That “truth will make you free” has got to be more than a wise saying; that has to be a realistic goal. Something worth striving for in a mixed-up world
Yep. The newspapers, like the lamestream media became cheer leaders for the anti-american left. Sad but true. Sad because they don’t have a clue as to their demise. Oh well, I still subscribe to me local paper for the sports. And the crossword puzzle. Also my wife is a big Sudoku fan.