Not Comics: A Little Bit More On The Death Of The Daily Newspaper

If you're even halfway as interested as I am about the rapid decline and even shuttering of newspaper going on right now, I thought I'd give you a heads up on some work out there on the subject. My first suggestion is a pair of opinion articles in Reason by Tim Cavanaugh and Matt Welch (Welch's is newer, and references Cavanaugh's). Both are brutal, frank and succinct dissections of some of the excessive wailing going on right now about the death of the newspaper industry as we know it. Both writers are smart and have newspaper experience. They know what they're talking about. Best of all, both engage the one thing that nearly no one brings up: how newspapers have contributed to their own current, dire situation by being bloated in terms of resources and staffing beyond any reasonable, sane measure.

I don't have the big city newspaper experience these guys have enjoyed, but I come from a newspaper family and worked on three or four of the smaller, Midwestern variety. As much as I love nearly all the people with whom I worked and respect the hell out of the best of them, I also remember constant jokes about newsrooms as a culture of indolence among the news staff and a daily reality that bore this observation out. I know that many of my close friends and classmates currently working on newspapers still report the same great imbalance of work and effort among staffers that carry most of these places through daily publication. Many of those same people admit to having much the same basic workload now as we did back when, despite time-saving resources at their behest about which the previous generation could have only dreamed. Welch's point that a start-up would never resemble a classic one-market one-newspaper business of the kind that are in trouble right now I think hits it best. There are of course multiple reasons for the precarious situation in which many newspapers find themselves, and it may be that the most severe causes make all the others irrelevant. I'm still glad to see writers out there willing to explore all of the factors in play, with the hope that such analysis might inform whatever new models rises from the ashes of the old.

That doesn't mean there isn't a human cost, so I also urge you to read an in placed pretty good and I think overall revelatory piece of self-referential journalism, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's first major article on the announcement they were being put up for sale (with the likelihood of closure). I thought it captured the feel of a surprised and stunned newsroom extremely well. At the same time, I didn't believe some of its assertions -- I'd like to know who these onlookers are who supposedly thought the P-I was safe because of a recent lawsuit -- and I'm not sure why a few of the pertinent facts it discussed were left unpacked or glossed over, like Hearst's revenue figures.
 
posted 7:15 am PST | Permalink
 

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