There’s no doubt that newspapers, especially conventional, words-on-paper newspapers, are dying. There are a few exceptions; the New York Times and Wall Street Journal seem to be doing reasonably well. Jeff Bezos is revitalizing the Washington Post. The Boston Globe, a better paper than many realize, claims it can pay for its newsroom with digital revenue alone.
There are other exceptions.
But the outlook is generally bleak. Many towns are now “news deserts,” in that they have no newspapers at all. Others have hybrids like Mlive.com. which are a shadow of the papers, like the Ann Arbor News, that they replaced. The Detroit Free Press and Detroit News have a tiny fraction of the readers and news they once did, and keep charging more and delivering less.
The reasons for this are well known, the biggest of which is the flight of advertising to the Internet, and the failure of newspapers to find a way to make anything like the money they’ve lost with digital ads. Then, too, most of us have become accustomed to instant “news,” constantly, all the time, delivered every minute, or second, on our smart phones or I-pads or whatever.
Printed newspapers can do no better than tell you what happened yesterday. Some years ago, Ariana Huffington appeared before some Congressional committee and was asked about the decline of newspapers. She responded sarcastically “I wasn’t around when stone tablets were being replaced by papers, but I am sure the makers of stone tablets felt the same way.”
Newspapers, in other words, are old technology, and anyone who waxes nostalgic for them might as well be an old fart in a Brooklyn Dodgers cap, muttering on a park bench about the good days. That’s an easy metaphor.
But also one that is, to a great extent wrong, and here’s why. You can get vast amounts of Donald Trump news, or even Pete Buttigieg news, on all sorts of platforms.
But do you have any idea what’s happening in your community? Bridge, the non-profit online news magazine run by the Center for Michigan, does a stunning job covering Michigan issues and does some interesting feature stories. Yet it can’t tell you how Adrian or Royal Oak or Wyandotte are really being run. That’s what local papers used to do.
Yes, some of them exist online. But there are no longer enough reporters to really do the job. There were 71,000 people working in U.S. newsrooms in 2008, according to the Pew Research Center; 39,000 in 2017. There are even fewer now. The New Orleans Times-Picayune, a newspaper founded the day before Michigan became a state, ceased to exist this month.
That’s not healthy for democracy. By the way, I said a moment ago that you could easily find lots of Donald Trump news. Well, you can. about his behavior. But do you really know what is happening in lots of important departments of government, like the Consumer Product Safety Commission? Of course you don’t. And you know what else?
If someone did a solid, in-depth story about that, or about what was really wrong with the way school funding works in Michigan, you couldn’t easily comprehend it on your phone.
There are, in fact, lots of cases where understanding of even breaking news improves if you contemplate it the next day. There’s one other thing we are losing as printed newspapers die, what you might call random access learning.
I call up lists of state government stories on the Internet daily. But when I read a newspaper, my eye falls accidentally on fascinating and important stories on entirely different topics I would never see otherwise. I wish we somehow could have a combination of the best of all the news media, new and old.
But what’s most important is that we need to find a way to support the independent, serious local, state and national journalism any democracy needs.
That is, if we care about having a democracy at all.
