DETROIT – Newspapers are in trouble nationwide, something that isn’t exactly a state secret. But did you know that the decline of newspapers throughout the world can be directly traced to one man?
That’s right. His name is Tim Berners-Lee, a mild-mannered young British computer scientist who came up with the invention that changed the world back in 1989, when he was working at CERN, a huge nuclear physics research facility in Switzerland.
Not that he had anything against newspapers; he wasn’t thinking about them at all. He said he was having trouble keeping track of his work and suddenly had an inspiration.
Lee took the concept of hypertext, which allows users to jump from one topic to another, created an early browser to search the then primitive and forbidding internet … and, as he said, voila!
What he had created was the World Wide Web. (Originally, he thought of calling it The Information Mine, but modestly backed away when he realized the initials spelled out his first name, Tim.)
Then he did something his fellow computer pioneers Bill Gates and Steve Jobs probably couldn’t have imagined: He put the World Wide Web out there in 1990, and gave it away for free.
Years later, Lee, now Sir Timothy after being knighted for his discovery by Queen Elizabeth, said he didn’t think anyone would use it if he tried to charge for it. But use it, we all soon did. Within a few years, you could find vast quantities of information with one click.
When something happened, from an earthquake to a home run to a financial disaster, you could use the World Wide Web to learn about it — and often see it live — immediately.
Soon, newspaper circulation began to plummet, which meant advertising revenue plummeted too. Newspapers tried putting their content online and selling online ads, but people were not willing to pay much for either. Nobody wanted to buy a classified ad to sell that old bicycle when they could put a free, or almost free, ad on an internet bulletin board.
Fewer ads and fewer subscribers meant papers had to shrink the size of their papers, printed and otherwise, and their staffs.
The numbers tell the story. Back in 1990, Americans bought, on average, more than 63 million newspaper copies every day. Last year, the total was 24 million, and dropping. The real picture is likely even worse, thanks to the devastating effects of the pandemic.
The advertising decline is clearly worse. Total newspaper ad revenue was $49.4 billion in 2005; that fell to $8.8 billion last year. Newspapers have been going out of business at an accelerating rate, and there’s even worse news ahead. Partly as a result of pandemic-related bottlenecks and shortages, the Economist magazine reports the cost of newsprint is up as much as 70 percent worldwide, something that seems certain to mean the demise of more print.
Many millennials might greet that news by rolling their eyes and saying, “OK, boomer.” Arianna Huffington, founder of one of the first online papers, once said “I suppose the makers of stone tablets complained too when the printing press came along.”
To some extent, they have a point. But not much of a point. Even now, traditional newspapers create the vast majority of reliable news content you can find online. When you read a news story in The Blade or the Detroit News or the New York Times, you know that it was written by someone trained in professional news gathering techniques and reviewed for accuracy by sharp-eyed editors.
You can’t say the same of “news” that comes from Joe’s basement blog. Millions of Americans do not know how to evaluate where “news” is coming from, like Kay, a 38-year-old woman I met in Ypsilanti. She had been vaccinated, but said she wasn’t going to get the booster because she read online that it would change her DNA.
When I told her that was false, she insisted that she had read it in an online paper, and so it had to be true.
Collecting real news, especially doing investigative work, is expensive, sometimes very expensive. News aggregators like Google or Yahoo aren’t really finding any news on their own.
They are collecting news from other sources, something that reminds me of cowbirds, which lay their eggs in other birds’ nests.
News aggregators also contribute to the demise of newspapers. Last year a cab driver in Pittsburgh told me she didn’t subscribe to the paper because news was supposed to be free, and you could find all you wanted on line. Well, that might seem true.
Except that the more we do that, the closer we come to bankrupting the actual producers of news. Plus, it isn’t even really true in many places where daily and weekly newspapers no longer survive. You can find all the Donald Trump news you want on line.
Try to find out what your local city council is doing with your money if you don’t have trained reporters watching them. Local news is, in many ways, the most important news for most of us.
But there are far fewer newspaper reporters than there used to be — less than half as many as in 2006 — and smaller papers have been especially devastated. Forbes magazine reports that more than 3.2 million Americans live in a county without a daily or even a weekly newspaper, a figure that is steadily increasing.
We may have a lot to give thanks for today, but if you aren’t worried about all this, you should be.
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