Political blogger Eric Alterman’s New Yorker essay on the apparently inevitable death spiral of the newspaper biz is a worthy encapsulation of the industry’s current conventional wisdom—that circulation and ad revenues are down for good, that they’ll just keep going downward, that no amount of “rightsizing” or firing people will bring papers back to stable profits, that ad revenues from papers’ Web sites can’t make up for collapsing print revenues.
In short, this CW goes, daily papers are doomed.
And with them goes not just the romantic image of the ink-stained wretch and Citizen Kane but the very flow of information a democratic society needs.
If reiterating this CW were all Alterman did in his piece, I wouldn’t bother discussing it here. But he also discusses some of this premise’s limitations.
One of the biggest such limitations has to do with the idea that the urban/suburban daily, as we’ve known it in our lifetimes, is the one (1) and only business model that could ever support serious, professional reporting.
Alterman knows this is a crock. He’s simply too polite to say so in so few words.
A Times of London essay a few years ago noted they typical newspaper’s particular package of information, entertainment, and infotainment wasn’t some eternal set-in-stone formula, but grew over decades of industry practice. Why should there be only one paper in most towns? Why should everyone have to get a sports section? Why do those sports sections cover a few big spectator sports in minutae, but ignore most participant sports?
I happen to believe journalism isn’t dying. It’s evolving. Into what, I don’t know. I spent much of the previous year with a group trying to figure that out. Our little group didn’t come up with a fully formed answer.
But I’m convinced such an answer is out there.
As this election year unfolds, so will online journalism; from repurposed print articles and volunteer blogs toward sites that are written for online reading from the ground up.
The business model for these sites will lag about a year behind the development of the sites themselves. And it has to be this way; otherwise, the more idiotic financial speculators will pour in and ruin it all.
