Posted on 08/24/2006 11:00:11 AM PDT by USFRIENDINVICTORIA
The most useful bit of the media is disappearing. A cause for concern, but not for panic
“A GOOD newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself,” mused Arthur Miller in 1961. A decade later, two reporters from the Washington Post wrote a series of articles that brought down President Nixon and the status of print journalism soared. At their best, newspapers hold governments and companies to account. They usually set the news agenda for the rest of the media. But in the rich world newspapers are now an endangered species. The business of selling words to readers and selling readers to advertisers, which has sustained their role in society, is falling apart (see article).
Of all the “old” media, newspapers have the most to lose from the internet. Circulation has been falling in America, western Europe, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand for decades (elsewhere, sales are rising). But in the past few years the web has hastened the decline. In his book “The Vanishing Newspaper”, Philip Meyer calculates that the first quarter of 2043 will be the moment when newsprint dies in America as the last exhausted reader tosses aside the last crumpled edition. That sort of extrapolation would have produced a harrumph from a Beaverbrook or a Hearst, but even the most cynical news baron could not dismiss the way that ever more young people are getting their news online. Britons aged between 15 and 24 say they spend almost 30% less time reading national newspapers once they start using the web.
Up to a podcast, Lord Copper? Advertising is following readers out of the door. The rush is almost unseemly, largely because the internet is a seductive medium that supposedly matches buyers with sellers and proves to advertisers that their money is well spent. Classified ads, in particular, are quickly shifting online. Rupert Murdoch, the Beaverbrook of our age, once described them as the industry's rivers of gold—but, as he said last year, “Sometimes rivers dry up.” In Switzerland and the Netherlands newspapers have lost half their classified advertising to the internet.
Newspapers have not yet started to shut down in large numbers, but it is only a matter of time. Over the next few decades half the rich world's general papers may fold. Jobs are already disappearing. According to the Newspaper Association of America, the number of people employed in the industry fell by 18% between 1990 and 2004. Tumbling shares of listed newspaper firms have prompted fury from investors. In 2005 a group of shareholders in Knight Ridder, the owner of several big American dailies, got the firm to sell its papers and thus end a 114-year history. This year Morgan Stanley, an investment bank, attacked the New York Times Company, the most august journalistic institution of all, because its share price had fallen by nearly half in four years.
Having ignored reality for years, newspapers are at last doing something. In order to cut costs, they are already spending less on journalism. Many are also trying to attract younger readers by shifting the mix of their stories towards entertainment, lifestyle and subjects that may seem more relevant to people's daily lives than international affairs and politics are. They are trying to create new businesses on- and offline. And they are investing in free daily papers, which do not use up any of their meagre editorial resources on uncovering political corruption or corporate fraud. So far, this fit of activity looks unlikely to save many of them. Even if it does, it bodes ill for the public role of the Fourth Estate.
Getting away with murder In future, as newspapers fade and change, will politicians therefore burgle their opponents' offices with impunity, and corporate villains whoop as they trample over their victims? Journalism schools and think-tanks, especially in America, are worried about the effect of a crumbling Fourth Estate. Are today's news organisations “up to the task of sustaining the informed citizenry on which democracy depends?” asked a recent report about newspapers from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, a charitable research foundation.
Nobody should relish the demise of once-great titles. But the decline of newspapers will not be as harmful to society as some fear. Democracy, remember, has already survived the huge television-led decline in circulation since the 1950s. It has survived as readers have shunned papers and papers have shunned what was in stuffier times thought of as serious news. And it will surely survive the decline to come.
That is partly because a few titles that invest in the kind of investigative stories which often benefit society the most are in a good position to survive, as long as their owners do a competent job of adjusting to changing circumstances. Publications like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal should be able to put up the price of their journalism to compensate for advertising revenues lost to the internet—especially as they cater to a more global readership. As with many industries, it is those in the middle—neither highbrow, nor entertainingly populist—that are likeliest to fall by the wayside.
The usefulness of the press goes much wider than investigating abuses or even spreading general news; it lies in holding governments to account—trying them in the court of public opinion. The internet has expanded this court. Anyone looking for information has never been better equipped. People no longer have to trust a handful of national papers or, worse, their local city paper. News-aggregation sites such as Google News draw together sources from around the world. The website of Britain's Guardian now has nearly half as many readers in America as it does at home.
In addition, a new force of “citizen” journalists and bloggers is itching to hold politicians to account. The web has opened the closed world of professional editors and reporters to anyone with a keyboard and an internet connection. Several companies have been chastened by amateur postings—of flames erupting from Dell's laptops or of cable-TV repairmen asleep on the sofa. Each blogger is capable of bias and slander, but, taken as a group, bloggers offer the searcher after truth boundless material to chew over. Of course, the internet panders to closed minds; but so has much of the press.
For hard-news reporting—as opposed to comment—the results of net journalism have admittedly been limited. Most bloggers operate from their armchairs, not the frontline, and citizen journalists tend to stick to local matters. But it is still early days. New online models will spring up as papers retreat. One non-profit group, NewAssignment.Net, plans to combine the work of amateurs and professionals to produce investigative stories on the internet. Aptly, $10,000 of cash for the project has come from Craig Newmark, of Craigslist, a group of free classified-advertisement websites that has probably done more than anything to destroy newspapers' income.
In future, argues Carnegie, some high-quality journalism will also be backed by non-profit organisations. Already, a few respected news organisations sustain themselves that way—including the Guardian, the Christian Science Monitor and National Public Radio. An elite group of serious newspapers available everywhere online, independent journalism backed by charities, thousands of fired-up bloggers and well-informed citizen journalists: there is every sign that Arthur Miller's national conversation will be louder than ever.
The elite mediot maggot infected owners of ABCNNBCBS and publishers of the major dinosaur fishwraps are the modern day, Norman Bates. They are trying to keep the corpses alive by refusing to admit that they are dead and to bury them.
Buy my Dinosaur Fishwrap stock, NYT. The old gray lady is just fine!
Maybe we need to start the Freeper Awards, much more meaningful and pro-american than the Nobel folks.
LOL. Norman is a regular guy compared the the sick bastards in the media.
Norman is the perfect poster girly boy for the maggots who control the media.
ROTFLMAO! The "old grey lady" indeed.
I love the newspaper, I just hate when it's used to indoctrinate me into a belief system that I despise.
I still plunk down sixty cents every day for a New York Post. I just refuse to patronize leftist newspapers.
A decade later, two reporters from the Washington Post wrote a series of articles that brought down President Nixon and the status of print journalism soared.
Nixon's ghost laughs at you fools.
Proud member of the Dinosaur Media DeathWatch™ Crew of the FReeping Parasitic Information Gatherers Brigade.
The day the Chicago American went from 7 cents to a dime, I knew it was over.
"The NY Times went over to the dark side around 1994, during Clinton's first term."
LA Times changed fairly quickly for the worse, in the 90s.
Once a centrist paper, it is now usually left. So I wrote my complaint and cencelled.
They contacted me to continue, but I said no thanks. Can't pay you for your editorials and edi-news.
My local paper is the venerable OC Register. Once Conservative, now libertarian. Against fighting muslims, and for legal drugs.
They use NYT edi-news feeds.
I wrote them to complain, but they didn't answer. Soon I will likely cancel them, too.
That will be two paper newspapers I stop paying for.
You are quite welcome Smartass, just reposting the same 'ol, same 'ol!!
Let em crumble.
Whenever I read about the old Gray Lady, I think of Psycho.
Now thanks to the creative people of FR, I can express that feeling.
I often wonder if we had the internet and something like Free Republic if Nixon might have stayed on as president.
LOL, he is scary looking!
Hope you saw this one;
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1688513/posts?page=31#31
Common Tator offers up some fairly good insights at his website. McCain's own behavior suggests that regardless of any Inet RINO Howard Baker would still knife Nixon in the back to try to suck up to journalistsTM for MSM accolade.
Watergate lessons. It took millions to get a Bakers Dozen votes.
. . .
The lesson of Watergate is also clear. It was not the Republican Minority leader Howard Baker who was rewarded for helping take down Richard Nixon. It was Nixon's supporters like Reagan that inherited the party. Baker holds the record of spending the most dollars per vote in a New Hampshire primary. Bakers media fame translated into a primary backlash against Howard Baker. That lesson is not lost on today's Republican leadership. That lesson was not lost on Democrats. Guess why they stood by Clinton? No one wanted to be Clinton's Howard Baker. It would have been a political loser.
Few Republicans and none of the leadership will do what Howard Baker did. It was a massive personal political failure.
But my main point is there are many examples of the media's biased reporting convincing the true believers and then using polling to try to convince others. Using failed strategies is something the media does over and over. They see the strategy like they see socialism. It will work the next time if they just do it right next time. Repeated failure rarely teaches the media a lesson.
What does work to take out a president? It is for a president's own party leaders to turn on him. That takes the president down. We also know that it takes the parties leaders down as well. For some strange reason, post Watergate. leaders of both parties are reluctant to follow Howard Bakers example.
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