Good times, bad times
After three decades in the newspaper business, I realized there is a certain bipolarity within the industry: When times are good, newspapers are a business. When times are bad, they’re a public trust.
For most of my tenure, times were good and newspapers were flush. They charged as much for advertising as the market could bear, most of them had monopolies in their towns, and the money rolled in. If there was any concern that economic circumstance might someday threaten the business, it was never exhibited. Everyone proceeded on the belief that the good times would last forever. I never once heard a news executive suggest that if newspapers were so important to public life, then maybe some profits should be tucked away to sustain the industry in periods of adversity.
Now, the good times are over and newspapers are threatened. Guess what? The industry is now a public trust, and too important to fade away. Here’s how a recent opinion piece in the New York Times put it:
“The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in January 1787. “And were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter.”
Today, we are dangerously close to having a government without newspapers.
Putting aside the fact that Jefferson — who had neither television nor radio nor Internet — would today have said “media” rather than “newspapers,” the basic sentiment is still well-founded. Rigorous reporting on government is a valuable thing and worth preserving. But that’s just one thing newspapers do. They also provide comic strips, television listings, betting lines for sporting events, movie reviews, recipes, advice to the lovelorn, and lifestyle articles celebrating the glories of feng shui and such. Are those things likewise uniquely valuable to the nation?
Of course not. But newspapers provide all those extras in the belief that it helps the industry keep its audience — although that audience long ago figured out those features are available elsewhere. The one thing people can’t get anywhere else is tough-nosed reporting on how their government functions.
So why can’t the newspaper industry seem to figure out how to build a business model around that one thing, which is both a public trust and desirable consumer product?
January 29th, 2009 at 8:40 am
I spent over three decades working in the business side of newspapers. In that time I suggested to both owners and supervisors that the continuation of the current business model could not exist long term. No one listened or wanted to listen. Times were good and I and a few others were lone wolves in the wilderness. Monopolies as a business model are not eternal and given time will die. The internet was the final nail to end the current newspaper business model and newspaper executives were slow to react, where they should have been pro-active. Yes, I too am saddened by the loss of newspapers as a watchdog over government. But frankly most large metro dailies have become partners WITH government and no longer do watchdog duty well anymore. Readers have noticed that news has become nothing more than agenda reporting and the trust between reader and editor is gone as well. Accuracy has been replaced with advocacy amd objectivity has been replaced with correctness.
January 29th, 2009 at 9:37 am
Despite being a Bulldog, you sometimes make sense.
January 29th, 2009 at 9:59 am
“So why can’t the newspaper industry seem to figure out how to build a business model around that one thing, which is both a public trust and desirable consumer product? ”
Can you say “media conglomerates”?
For small locally-owned papers it is probably possible, but large corporations are notoriously bad at reacting swiftly to change or planning for the long hawl. When worrying about maximizing shareholder dividends is seen as the primary goal long term sustainability just isn’t important.
January 29th, 2009 at 11:58 am
Brother Dan’s observation are all well and good, but he left out one important reason newspapers are vital to a free society:
Where else, pray tell, can a person of no useful physical skills, such as welding, auto-repair or being a hit man for the Dixie Mafia, and who suffers an aversion to mind-numbing academic pursuits such as spoon-feeding mush into the brains of young people, or is simply too damn cool to sell shoes, tinker with computers or shuffle papers in a windowless state guvmint cubicle where one’s only diversion is secretly cruising the Web looking for free porn, find love and a regular paycheck?
Trust me, I did it for 36 years. I know these things. Print journalism allows you to hang out with the funniest , most creative and bull-headed free thinkers ever collected under one leaky roof.
That is an asylum worth saving, else where would smart-assed punks who don’t play well with others have to go? Nobody else can tolerate us. You surely don’t want us working in polite company, do you?
-30-
January 29th, 2009 at 12:14 pm
Cranky Old Guy: All the more reason for newspaper executives to figure out an updated business model ASAP. They won’t be able to employ all those people with no useful skills, but some of them will be retained. As for the others? Well, I suppose they could start Web sites. WAW has kept me off the street and out of bars.
January 29th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
Sadly, newspaper executives haven’t figured out anything imaginative other than how to get newsroom people to happily work for wages most college graduates would scoff at while racking up profit margins in the mid-20 percent range.
Liberals, my a**. They’ve thought and lived like the robber barons of old and now that hard times and the need for innovation and creativity have come, they’re stupefied. All they know how to do now is wreck the lives of the worker bees who believed in them.
January 29th, 2009 at 1:20 pm
What keeps the newspaper industry from providing the public with an unbiased depiction of government?
Institutionalized arrogance. The intellectual elites running today’s newspapers feel a duty to enlighten the working people, to let them benefit from their years of experience and from their heightened, compassionate sense of evolved human values. To do any less would be to lose face in the company of one’s intellectual elite peers and power brokers.
There’s a definite corporate mindset in the halls of newspapers. It is the mindset of the intellectual elite. There are correct opinions to hold about your government, its, candidates, and its policies while working at a newspaper.
When newspaper management shifts from inquiry to advocacy, shaping and filtering of the information that is passed to working people must occur. Intellectual elites feel that burden of responsibility. Some information should be overlooked, other information should be amplified. See GD’s Sept. 5 WAW, “The curtain pulled aside,” for an example of corporate mindthink and now N&O advocated delivering selected political information and content to the working people.
Problem is, being an intellectual elite makes you susceptible to toxic narcissism, in the way living in a swamp makes you susceptible to mosquito bites. The blinders of arrogance and hubris produce managers who vastly overestimate their sphere of expertise. So newspaper magnates pooh-poohed those who told them the internet was changing technology and news reader habits…
Why, newspaper management is a shining amalgam of intellectual elites, and buoyed by their collective genius and human compassion, newspapers just *can’t* fail, it’s not possible! And how could information from non-elites, in pajamas for crying out loud, on the internet for FREE ever displace us, and our power, and our wisdom…
And so the mighty Titanic plowed full steam ahead. For the leaders presumed, newspapers are Too Big To Fail. They assumed they were too important to be affected by changing technologies. They were too smart to anticipate working people thinking on their own, instead of subsisting on a pablum of pre-selected parochial sound bites.
Webster defines arrogance as, “an attitude of superiority manifested in an overbearing manner or in presumptuous claims or assumptions.” Now… go read some of the N&O missives G.D. has shared with us here. Thoughts?
Today’s newspapers don’t fulfill the need outlined by Jefferson’s quote. Instead, they fulfill the needs outlined by Karl Marx. Substitute “intelligentsia” for “intellectual elites” and “proletarian” for “working people” and suddenly you can find the business model newspapers have been following.
It’s spelled out in Marx’s work, “Das Capital.”
January 29th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
Well another reason the news media is going broke
is that they allow people like Timothy Tyson to spread lies
Proof Here
and like the N&O,
Herehas never been objective and allowed Tyson to write
anything he wanted. And don’t forget The Oxford Public Ledger, on Dec 04,2008 where the editor ran a half page editorial “An Interview With Author Tim Tyson” The editor states Tim and I talk and correspond now on a regular basis. And I think you will enjoy the folling interview as it sheds light on the book and soon to be film.This is the kicker statement. “Please let me know your reaction and I’ll either include it in a future column or pass it on to Tim. LOL Well any literate person can read between the lines there. If it’s a question that will allow Tim to praise himself print it, but if it’s a question to ask Tim why it seems to be impossible for him to tell the truth and admit he’s a liar. Don’t print it.
January 29th, 2009 at 2:45 pm
“There’s a definite corporate mindset in the halls of newspapers. It is the mindset of the intellectual elite. ”
Really Core Conservative? I always saw the corporate mindset as the likes of those clowns from the auto industry who drove their companies into the ground and then went to DC on their private jets seeking a handout. You know, Reagan Republicans. Against the unions, workers in general, and all those nasty social programs. Hardly the intellectual elite. I know the intellectual elite. I’m the son of a college professor and spent 10 years in college trying fairly successfully to not be forced out into the job market.
January 29th, 2009 at 4:32 pm
BP, do you sell gas, could you sure seem to be full of it? Clue in man, and speak truth to power!