Media: Imagining a world without newspapers

For the newspaper business, the news “stinks,” said Joe Garofoli in the San Francisco Chronicle. A new report by the Pew Foundation’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has found that the newspaper industry’s decline accelerated last year, with circulation dropping 2.5 percent and advertising revenue falling 7 percent. With revenues sinking, newspapers are cutting their reporting staffs and curtailing coverage. But, the Pew report found, there is a glimmer of hope. Newspapers, long thought of as technological dinosaurs, have been finally embracing the Internet, adding blogs and other features to their websites and connecting with readers in new ways. In fact, many of the top website destinations are traditional news brands such as The New York Times, proving that citizens still want what these companies produce—original reporting. There’s a problem, though: On the Web, readers get it all for free. “The audience still sees a lot of value in reporting about public life,” said Pew researcher Tom Rosenstiel. “What media companies need to do is figure out how to make money doing it.”

If they can’t, said Russell Smith in the Toronto Globe and Mail, newspaper companies won’t be the only losers. The public will suffer, too. As the Pew report found, the proliferation of news sites and blogs hasn’t led to more news being found and reported. In fact, as the Web grows, there may actually be less news. That’s because most websites simply “repackage” news found in traditional media, while bloggers spin and analyze it. Finding out what politicians don’t want us to know—whether in our hometowns or in Washington or Iraq—is hard work, and it’s expensive. When newspapers that now do that work shed most of their reporting staffs, or go out of business entirely, what will everyone else write about?

That’s a truly scary thought, said Eric Alterman in The New Yorker. Opinion-oriented websites such as Huffingtonpost.com have contributed greatly to the national discourse, but such sites have small staffs and virtually no reporters. Contrast that to The New York Times, which has about 1,200 newsroom employees, or to The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, with 800 to 900 each. Yes, some may be lazy or biased or sloppy. But most are committed to ferreting out information from the dark places in which governments hide the truth. Our political system relies on the informed consent of its citizens, and that means we need the information that newspapers are in the business of digging up. Without it, “it is impossible not to wonder what will become of not just news but democracy itself.”

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