Out of Print: The death and life of the American newspaper

The New Yorker: The News Business
Out of Print
The death and life of the American newspaper.
by Eric Alterman


Arianna Huffington questions newspapers’ “veneer of unassailable trustworthiness.”

....Taking (newspapers') place, of course, is the Internet, which is about to pass newspapers as a source of political news for American readers. For young people, and for the most politically engaged, it has already done so. As early as May, 2004, newspapers had become the least preferred source for news among younger people. According to “Abandoning the News,” published by the Carnegie Corporation, thirty-nine per cent of respondents under the age of thirty-five told researchers that they expected to use the Internet in the future for news purposes; just eight per cent said that they would rely on a newspaper. It is a point of ironic injustice, perhaps, that when a reader surfs the Web in search of political news he frequently ends up at a site that is merely aggregating journalistic work that originated in a newspaper, but that fact is not likely to save any newspaper jobs or increase papers’ stock valuation....

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....it is true: no Web site spends anything remotely like what the best newspapers do on reporting. Even after the latest round of new cutbacks and buyouts are carried out, the (New York) Times will retain a core of more than twelve hundred newsroom employees, or approximately fifty times as many as the Huffington Post. The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times maintain between eight hundred and nine hundred editorial employees each. The Times’ Baghdad bureau alone costs around three million dollars a year to maintain. And while the Huffington Post shares the benefit of these investments, it shoulders none of the costs. Despite the many failures at newspapers, the vast majority of reporters and editors have devoted years, even decades, to understanding the subjects of their stories....

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(Arianna) Huffington fails to address the parasitical relationship that virtually all Internet news sites and blog commentators enjoy with newspapers....And so even if one agrees with all of Huffington’s jabs at the Times, and Edsall’s critique of the Washington Post, it is impossible not to wonder what will become of not just news but democracy itself, in a world in which we can no longer depend on newspapers to invest their unmatched resources and professional pride in helping the rest of us to learn, however imperfectly, what we need to know....

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Arianna Huffington, for her part, believes that the online and the print newspaper model are beginning to converge: “As advertising dollars continue to move online — as they slowly but certainly are — HuffPost will be adding more and more reporting and the Times and Post model will continue with the kinds of reporting they do, but they’ll do more of it originally online.” She predicts “more vigorous reporting in the future that will include distributed journalism—wisdom-of-the-crowd reporting of the kind that was responsible for the exposing of the Attorneys General firing scandal.” As for what may be lost in this transition, she is untroubled: “A lot of reporting now is just piling on the conventional wisdom — with important stories dying on the front page of the New York Times.”...

And so we are about to enter a fractured, chaotic world of news, characterized by superior community conversation but a decidedly diminished level of first-rate journalism. The transformation of newspapers from enterprises devoted to objective reporting to a cluster of communities, each engaged in its own kind of “news” – and each with its own set of “truths” upon which to base debate and discussion – will mean the loss of a single national narrative and agreed-upon set of “facts” by which to conduct our politics. News will become increasingly “red” or “blue.”...

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/31/080331fa_fact_alterman?currentPage=all

"will mean the loss of a single national narrative "

good. i like to get my news from a variety of sources. i don't believe there is even such a thing as UNbiased news.

all reporters, editors, etc. necessarily affect the product.

a single national narrative means somebody (or group of body's) is in charge of defining what is and isn't news.

i'd rather have fractured, ground-up influence to help break that up

referenced in the article. Blogs, at least at present, don't have foreign bureaus or large numbers of reporters. They have begun to break some stories, like the U.S. Attorney scandal -- and maybe as time goes on, and they become profitable, they can begin to hire large numbers of people to cover "news." That is, world events, Congressional business, etc. -- all the things we see on Huff Post that come now originally from newspapers.