White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

  • Home
  • King’s Commentaries
  • Random Features
  • Photos
  • Public Speaker
  • WHC Episodes
  • About WHC
  • Carrying Stations
  • ME/CFS Alert
  • Contact Us

Requiem for Reporting

October 28, 2008 by Llewellyn King 2 Comments

 

 

 

 

The newspaper of the Newspaper Guild tells the terrible truth: traditional newspaper journalism is dying faster than anyone thought. Almost every major newspaper is making drastic cuts in staffing, from The Washington Post to The Chicago Sun-Times, from The St. Louis Post-Dispatch to The Philadelphia Inquirer, and from The Dallas Morning News to The Modesto Bee. Forty percent of the Newark Star-Ledger’s newsroom staff will depart in a buyout wave. Jim Wilse, editor of The Star-Ledger, said 151 buyout offers were accepted in a newsroom of about 330 people.

Here in Washington, the all-important bureaus which make up most of the Washington press corps are being decimated; and I mean that in the current usage of cut by 90 percent, not the original usage of cut by 10 percent. Colleagues and friends abound who are writing books, trying public relations or seeking government jobs.

The cause of the hollowing out of newspapers is well known: the Internet is getting the information out faster, it is mostly free and the reader can access it selectively. The trouble is that the information on the Web is, if it is any good, first appeared in a newspaper somewhere.

Newspapers still keep the record, but they are woefully behind the times. Today’s newspaper makes no concessions to the passage of time. It is produced in a factory in the middle of the night, transported through the traffic, and entrusted to a child for delivery.

 

Worse, the business model is hopelessly outmoded. It relies on a healthy stream of advertising revenue to make up for the poor income from actual sales of the product.

 

The story is the same in all advanced countries. Newspapers are in trouble, serious, mortal trouble. Only in emerging markets are newspaper sales growing, and that often reflects poor penetration of personal computers and government control of broadcasting.

 

Newspapers have suffered electronic competition in the past and survived. They were portable and kept a tangible record of events. You cannot hook up a printer to a radio or a television set, but you can to a computer. Advertisers can even distribute coupons via the Web.

 

H.L. Mencken, America’s greatest journalist, feared for the morning newspapers in his day because all the circulation and wealth was in the evening papers. Television put paid to that.

 

In Washington, until the 1960s, the dominant paper was The Evening Star. After its purchase and merger with The Times Herald (a weak morning paper owned out of Chicago) in 1954, The Washington Post became the most important political newspaper in the country and a cash generator for its owners. The 40-year golden age of the morning newspaper was dawning. Now it is fading.

 

The mighty New York Times lost money in one quarter this year and may repeat the sorry event. The Washington Post is being subsidized by a test-cramming company, Kaplan, Inc. Two once-proud titles, The Chicago Tribune and The Los Angeles Times, are at the mercy of a man who, in newspaper terms, is a Philistine—loud-mouthed, vulgar and insensitive to the journalistic craft.

 

There are those who would take pleasure in the agony, and what might be the death throes, of the mainstream media, but they would be ill advised. With the death of newspapers goes the health of the Republic. Democracy only works with a vigorous, disrespectful press, demanding and providing transparency in every aspect of life. The press may be disreputable and eccentric, but it is the indispensable partner of the ballot box.

 

Freedom of the press is the freedom to comment and to criticize. But more important, it is the freedom to investigate. Without investigation, government, corporations and even science goes about its business in the corrupting dark.

 

Already, reflecting the collapse of the Washington reporter corps, there has been a falloff in the number of Freedom of Information Act requests. There are fewer newspapers which can afford to have correspondents travel with the president. Newspapers are not detaching reporters for investigative work of the kind undertaken by The Washington Post on the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Foreign bureaus, in critical places like Baghdad and Kabul, are not being staffed, let alone Moscow, Beijing and Tokyo.

 

No entity in the blogosphere has the resources to take up the newspaper role.

Opinion is cheap. Reporting costs money–a lot of money. The unintended consequence of this collapse is that the Associated Press will become more important politically and socially than is good for any organization in the news business. The shafts of light will be fewer in the long winter for news ahead.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Email, RSS Follow
Email

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: democracy, freedom of the press, newspapers

Comments

  1. Joseph Luchok says

    October 30, 2008 at 1:22 pm

    Llewellyn has hit a home run with this article. It is sad time for all of us. Newspapers reporters have been the backbone of our republic. Certainly there has excesses and scandals in the business but they have been far outweighed by the many stories brought to light and explained by newspaper reporters.

    The demise of the Washington press corps means more people will getting their government “news” from the government, as members of Congress film segments that will be sent to local stations.

    Reply
  2. atilla says

    November 17, 2008 at 3:11 pm

    Wow, this is very insightful

    Reply

Leave a Reply to Joseph Luchok Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

White House Chronicle on Social

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Vimeo
  • YouTube
Wireless Charging Is the Holy Grail of Electric Vehicle World

Wireless Charging Is the Holy Grail of Electric Vehicle World

Llewellyn King

It is a dream still associated with the Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla: broadcasting electricity, making it available to users without a wire. Tesla took his plans for sending electricity through the air to the grave with him, having been one of the architects of alternating current, which was the building block of the electrified world. […]

Morocco: A ‘Destination’ for Renewable Energy under a New Kind of Sun King

Morocco: A ‘Destination’ for Renewable Energy under a New Kind of Sun King

Llewellyn King

The Sahara has a lot of land and a lot of sun, making it an appealing place to site massive solar generating stations, and the Kingdom of Morocco is doing just that. Add substantial wind resources inland and on the coast and Morocco looks set to fulfill its declared intention of not only satisfying its […]

New ‘Hunger Winter’ Looms as Europe Prepares to Shiver

New ‘Hunger Winter’ Looms as Europe Prepares to Shiver

Llewellyn King

Even as Europe has been dealing with its hottest summer on record, it has been fearfully aware that it may face its worst winter since the one at the end of World War II, from 1944 to 1945. Electricity shortages and unpayable fuel prices for many households are in store for Europe. Industrial production in […]

The Thrill of a Human Being on the Line

The Thrill of a Human Being on the Line

Llewellyn King

Something wonderful happened to me recently. I spoke on the telephone to a human being at a credit card company. Well, not immediately. That would be too much to expect. I had to go through some of the hoops of the company’s automated phone system, beginning with, “Listen carefully because our menu has changed.” And, […]

Copyright © 2022 · White House Chronicle Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in