And it includes Chicago, where both local papers slashed staff and content, and where, to take advantage of the resulting void, The New York Times partnered with the Chicago News Cooperative, a young nonprofit run by the Tribune’s former managing editor, James O’Shea. The cooperative provides the Times with local coverage two days a week focused on city and state politics, policy, and culture. The Journal is considering similar metro coverage in Chicago as well as Los Angeles.
No matter the platform, what all these ventures have in common is that they’re betting on smart news that gives more to the people who want it, need it, and are willing to pay for it. It’s certainly not clear that smartening up the news will work. But it’s clear that dumbing it down will not.
Dumbing down the papers is contributing to the death spiral. I think about this a lot because I grew up with three daily newspapers in our house and I read the paper-paper everyday until about 3 yrs ago. My habits changed coincidentally around the same time that Philadelphia's newspapers were gutted and sold and declined in quality. During that time major events were occurring in my city but I was learning about them after the fact; the changes and the controversies were silent to me. It was a shock to realize that I was consuming information almost continuously throughout the day among multiple platforms of web, radio, and tv but I was profoundly ill-informed on important local issues that affect my life.
In that situation the antidote was to get involved with community groups and to participate in formal citizen-engagement events that were funded by foundations and administered jointly by journalists from the papers and local public radio. The focus was the mayor's race and waterfront development but the medium was in-person presentations and conversations. And it was good. But the hoopla has died down and now I get my important news online from the paper and other sources. I also opted for the free Metro during that time because they were coming out with better information about those important issues at the same time that the real papers either didn't get it or they were intently interested in preventing the public from full awareness of the facts and their significance (my deep suspicion at the time). It was those issues that made me realize how good the papers had been, were no longer, and how much I had trusted the papers but no longer do. (I feel like the papers are holding my local news hostage, frankly, so I can't completely turn away from them, no matter how awful its website or its dwindling print format.)
So I've given this whole issue a lot of thought and my current take on the situation is to not buy into the myth that technology killed the newspapers. I am now looking at the newspaper crisis as like that of the Dust Bowl in the '30's. The Dust Bowl was an agrarian, human, and economic catastrophe that had multiple consequences and causes. But no one would ever say that our civilization no longer needs farming or its products because the economic model failed in the 1930's. The Dust Bowl was caused by climate change in combination with damaging farming practices such as the failure to rotate crops. Their drought might be comparable to the collapse of advertising which supported print media so well for so long. And as farming developed an exploitative relationship with the land, it may be fair to say that media consolidation resulted in comparable consequences that could not sustain good journalism when the soil dried up and the wind blew away the shallow roots (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl).
One enduring aftermath of the Dust Bowl is the collapse of family farms and the rise of giant agri-business, which Michael Pollan links so compellingly to our nation's energy and obesity crises. Good journalism might be comparable to the practice of crop rotation; it's failure might be one important factor contributing to journalism's dust bowl. I think an overlooked climate change issue is the collapse of advertising which may have been a canary in the economic coal mine suggesting that the real economy began to decline much earlier than its official onset in 2007/2008 (and might be far worse than officially acknowledged). If our culture shifts swiftly and entirely to electronic media, I believe we will experience troubling outcomes such as an unwitting apartheid of important information that reaches the desk-based workforce but leaves out other, important groups of our population. So I recognize the significance of the disruptive changes of our time but it's too easy to blame the internet.
#1 Posted by MB, CJR on Fri 29 Jan 2010 at 11:40 AM
Yes and yes! As a longtime Trib subscriber, I sometimes have the feeling, "Dude, where's my paper?" Especially in the '80s and to an extent in the '90s, the Trib had wonderful writing and reporting, an array of columnists (paging Bob Greene), and excellent local media and entertainment coverage from the likes of Steve Daley. Okay, it was a little grey and there were articles from foreign countries, but in a way that added to the "eminence grise" sense of ponderous yet trustworthy authority. Now we get pointlessly huge photos of some poor inner-city kid and hardly any coverage of a certain important guy from Chicago. My husband and I still get the Trib -- the inertia of habit -- but also the suburban-focused Daily Herald and, yes, the Times. We're smart, relatively affluent and read ads. And as boomers we're (hopefully) not exactly shuffling off the landscape yet. I agree with Lisa Anderson: it's good business to focus on your core consumer.
#2 Posted by Elizabeth, CJR on Tue 23 Feb 2010 at 01:36 PM