Dear colleagues:
You’re under pressure. I empathize. But listen: I nearly drowned in chaos my first day as a reporter for The Post-Standard (in Syracuse, New York) twenty-eight years ago. We were struggling to make sense of new technology, fighting small-town, tin-pot dictators, and trying to cover a tidal wave of news with far too few reporters and editors. But the day ended, a new one was dawning, and we had put the news at the fingertips of our readers. I was dog-tired, joyful, and proud.
My last day there was exactly the same. Take heart in that symmetry. (I accepted a buyout from The Post-Standard in May 2007. I’m teaching journalism at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University.)
Advice for the newly minted journalist? Read Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley, but don’t despair. Ponder what life would be like if no one cared enough to recite the day’s list of human failings for those within earshot. Now, that would be dismal. Without journalism, there is no hope for progress. Believe that every person should be treated with respect and act on it. If you don’t believe that, please find another profession.
And give a damn, will you? I’ll be watching for your bylines.
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The steady drip of layoffs and buyouts, slowly desiccating once-vibrant newsrooms around the country, has also produced a reservoir of anger, sadness, fear, uncertainty—even some cautious optimism here and there—among reporters and editors who invested years, decades in some cases, of their lives to print journalism. We’ve asked anyone so inclined to channel these emotions, not into rant—although there will be a bit of that—but rather into reflection on what went wrong, and where we might go from here. We will publish one per day, under the headline “Parting Thoughts.” All of the letters we publish will be collected here.
I studied to be a print journalist and ended up a lawyer. For years I often felt I had taken the wrong path. And then came the recent death by attrition of newspapers as we have known them. Somehow I felt relieved for the first time that I was not there, in the press room, to oversee the death of something I once loved...and still do.
Newspapers now try to act like the internet or TV -- but they have neither the immediacy nor the ability to do so.
I am now an outsider and as such the solution seems obvious. It does not lie in dumbing down every newspaper in the country by making the pictures bigger and the print smaller.
The days of every town of any size having a daily newspaper of its own are over. We need to start doing what other businesses faced with these competitive dilemmas do: consolidate.
What sense does it make, for example, for the New York Times to have a string of little newspapers being printed here and there in Florida when it could simply sell the real McCoy in each of these cities and, at minimal expense, enhance The Times with local editions for the local news?
Do we really need hundreds of frail newspapers running the same wire stories and pretending to be independent sources of information?
I am struck by the ineptitude of the modern press barons. They can't seem to figure out that they need a different business model. For now they all seem to think that jetisoning staff and pages and detail is the solution to their problem when the one thing they can and will be able to continue to offer, beyond the shallow feed from TV and the internet, is detail and depth.
Maybe someone out there will figure this out before its too late.
Posted by Harvey Alper on Wed 23 Jul 2008 at 07:43 PM