[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Out of Print

[Bill Totten]

The death and life of the American newspaper

by Eric Alterman

www.newyorker.com (March 31 2008)


The American newspaper has been around for approximately three hundred
years. Benjamin Harris's spirited Publick Occurrences, Both Forreign and
Domestick managed just one issue, in 1690, before the Massachusetts
authorities closed it down. Harris had suggested a politically incorrect
hard line on Indian removal and shocked local sensibilities by reporting
that the King of France had been taking liberties with the Prince's wife.

It really was not until 1721, when the printer James Franklin launched
the New England Courant, that any of Britain's North American colonies
saw what we might recognize today as a real newspaper. Franklin,
Benjamin's older brother, refused to adhere to customary licensing
arrangements and constantly attacked the ruling powers of New England,
thereby achieving both editorial independence and commercial success. He
filled his paper with crusades (on everything from pirates to the power
of Cotton and Increase Mather), literary essays by Addison and Steele,
character sketches, and assorted philosophical ruminations.

Three centuries after the appearance of Franklin's Courant, it no longer
requires a dystopic imagination to wonder who will have the dubious
distinction of publishing America's last genuine newspaper. Few believe
that newspapers in their current printed form will survive. Newspaper
companies are losing advertisers, readers, market value, and, in some
cases, their sense of mission at a pace that would have been barely
imaginable just four years ago. Bill Keller, the executive editor of the
Times, said recently in a speech in London, "At places where editors and
publishers gather, the mood these days is funereal. Editors ask one
another, 'How are you?', in that sober tone one employs with friends who
have just emerged from rehab or a messy divorce." Keller's speech
appeared on the Web site of its sponsor, the Guardian, under the
headline "NOT DEAD YET".

Perhaps not, but trends in circulation and advertising - the rise of the
Internet, which has made the daily newspaper look slow and unresponsive;
the advent of Craigslist, which is wiping out classified advertising -
have created a palpable sense of doom. Independent, publicly traded
American newspapers have lost forty-two per cent of their market value
in the past three years, according to the media entrepreneur Alan
Mutter. Few corporations have been punished on Wall Street the way those
who dare to invest in the newspaper business have. The McClatchy
Company, which was the only company to bid on the Knight Ridder chain
when, in 2005, it was put on the auction block, has surrendered more
than eighty per cent of its stock value since making the $6.5 billion
purchase. Lee Enterprises' stock is down by three-quarters since it
bought out the Pulitzer chain, the same year. America's most prized
journalistic possessions are suddenly looking like corporate millstones.
Rather than compete in an era of merciless transformation, the families
that owned the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal sold off
the majority of their holdings. The New York Times Company has seen its
stock decline by fifty-four per cent since the end of 2004, with much of
the loss coming in the past year; in late February, an analyst at
Deutsche Bank recommended that clients sell off their Times stock. The
Washington Post Company has avoided a similar fate only by rebranding
itself an "education and media company"; its testing and prep company,
Kaplan, now brings in at least half the company's revenue.

Until recently, newspapers were accustomed to operating as high-margin
monopolies. To own the dominant, or only, newspaper in a mid-sized
American city was, for many decades, a kind of license to print money.
In the Internet age, however, no one has figured out how to rescue the
newspaper in the United States or abroad. Newspapers have created Web
sites that benefit from the growth of online advertising, but the sums
are not nearly enough to replace the loss in revenue from circulation
and print ads.

Most managers in the industry have reacted to the collapse of their
business model with a spiral of budget cuts, bureau closings, buyouts,
layoffs, and reductions in page size and column inches. Since 1990, a
quarter of all American newspaper jobs have disappeared. The columnist
Molly Ivins complained, shortly before her death, that the newspaper
companies' solution to their problem was to make "our product smaller
and less helpful and less interesting". That may help explain why the
dwindling number of Americans who buy and read a daily paper are
spending less time with it; the average is down to less than fifteen
hours a month. Only nineteen per cent of Americans between the ages of
eighteen and thirty-four claim even to look at a daily newspaper. The
average age of the American newspaper reader is fifty-five and rising.

Philip Meyer, in his book The Vanishing Newspaper (2004), predicts that
the final copy of the final newspaper will appear on somebody's doorstep
one day in 2043. It may be unkind to point out that all these parlous
trends coincide with the opening, this spring, of the $450-million
Newseum, in Washington, DC, but, more and more, what Bill Keller calls
"that lovable old-fashioned bundle of ink and cellulose" is starting to
feel like an artifact ready for display under glass.

Taking its place, of course, is the Internet, which is about to pass
newspapers as a source of political news for American readers. For young
people, and for the most politically engaged, it has already done so. As
early as May 2004, newspapers had become the least preferred source for
news among younger people. According to "Abandoning the News", published
by the Carnegie Corporation, thirty-nine per cent of respondents under
the age of thirty-five told researchers that they expected to use the
Internet in the future for news purposes; just eight per cent said that
they would rely on a newspaper. It is a point of ironic injustice,
perhaps, that when a reader surfs the Web in search of political news he
frequently ends up at a site that is merely aggregating journalistic
work that originated in a newspaper, but that fact is not likely to save
any newspaper jobs or increase papers' stock valuation.

Among the most significant aspects of the transition from "dead tree"
newspapers to a world of digital information lies in the nature of
"news" itself. The American newspaper (and the nightly newscast) is
designed to appeal to a broad audience, with conflicting values and
opinions, by virtue of its commitment to the goal of objectivity. Many
newspapers, in their eagerness to demonstrate a sense of balance and
impartiality, do not allow reporters to voice their opinions publicly,
march in demonstrations, volunteer in political campaigns, wear
political buttons, or attach bumper stickers to their cars.

In private conversation, reporters and editors concede that objectivity
is an ideal, an unreachable horizon, but journalists belong to a
remarkably thin-skinned fraternity, and few of them will publicly admit
to betraying in print even a trace of bias. They discount the notion
that their beliefs could interfere with their ability to report a story
with perfect balance. As the venerable "dean" of the Washington press
corps, David Broder, of the Post, puts it, "There just isn't enough
ideology in the average reporter to fill a thimble".

Meanwhile, public trust in newspapers has been slipping at least as
quickly as the bottom line. A recent study published by Sacred Heart
University found that fewer than twenty per cent of Americans said they
could believe "all or most" media reporting, a figure that has fallen
from more than twenty-seven per cent just five years ago. "Less than one
in five believe what they read in print", the 2007 "State of the News
Media" report, issued by the Project for Excellence in Journalism,
concluded. "CNN is not really more trusted than Fox, or ABC than NBC.
The local paper is not viewed much differently than the New York Times."
Vastly more Americans believe in flying saucers and 9/11 conspiracy
theories than believe in the notion of balanced - much less "objective"
- mainstream news media. Nearly nine in ten Americans, according to the
Sacred Heart study, say that the media consciously seek to influence
public policies, though they disagree about whether the bias is liberal
or conservative.

No less challenging is the rapid transformation that has taken place in
the public's understanding of, and demand for, "news" itself. Rupert
Murdoch, in a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, in
April 2005 - two years before his five-billion-dollar takeover of Dow
Jones & Company and the Wall Street Journal - warned the industry's top
editors and publishers that the days when "news and information were
tightly controlled by a few editors, who deigned to tell us what we
could and should know", were over. No longer would people accept "a
godlike figure from above" presenting the news as "gospel". Today's
consumers "want news on demand, continuously updated. They want a point
of view about not just what happened but why it happened ... And
finally, they want to be able to use the information in a larger
community - to talk about, to debate, to question, and even to meet
people who think about the world in similar or different ways".

One month after Murdoch's speech, a thirty-one-year-old computer whiz,
Jonah Peretti, and a former AOL. executive, Kenneth Lerer, joined the
ubiquitous commentator-candidate-activist Arianna Huffington to launch a
new Web site, which they called the Huffington Post. First envisaged as
a liberal alternative to the Drudge Report, the Huffington Post started
out by aggregating political news and gossip; it also organized a group
blog, with writers drawn largely from Huffington's alarmingly vast array
of friends and connections. Huffington had accumulated that network
during years as a writer on topics from Greek philosophy to the life of
Picasso, as the spouse of a wealthy Republican congressman in
California, and now, after a divorce and an ideological conversion, as a
Los Angeles-based liberal commentator and failed gubernatorial candidate.

Almost by accident, however, the owners of the Huffington Post had
discovered a formula that capitalized on the problems confronting
newspapers in the Internet era, and they are convinced that they are
ready to reinvent the American newspaper. "Early on, we saw that the key
to this enterprise was not aping Drudge", Lerer recalls. "It was taking
advantage of our community. And the key was to think of what we were
doing through the community's eyes."

On the Huffington Post, Peretti explains, news is not something handed
down from above but "a shared enterprise between its producer and its
consumer". Echoing Murdoch, he says that the Internet offers editors
"immediate information" about which stories interest readers, provoke
comments, are shared with friends, and generate the greatest number of
Web searches. An Internet-based news site, Peretti contends, is
therefore "alive in a way that is impossible for paper and ink".

Though Huffington has a news staff (it is tiny, but the hope is to
expand in the future), the vast majority of the stories that it features
originate elsewhere, whether in print, on television, or on someone's
video camera or cell phone. The editors link to whatever they believe to
be the best story on a given topic. Then they repurpose it with a
catchy, often liberal-leaning headline and provide a comment section
beneath it, where readers can chime in. Surrounding the news articles
are the highly opinionated posts of an apparently endless army of both
celebrity (Nora Ephron, Larry David) and non-celebrity bloggers - more
than eighteen hundred so far. The bloggers are not paid. The over-all
effect may appear chaotic and confusing, but, Lerer argues, "this new
way of thinking about, and presenting, the news, is transforming news as
much as CNN did thirty years ago". Arianna Huffington and her partners
believe that their model points to where the news business is heading.
"People love to talk about the death of newspapers, as if it's a
foregone conclusion. I think that's ridiculous", she says. "Traditional
media just need to realize that the online world isn't the enemy. In
fact, it's the thing that will save them, if they fully embrace it."

It's an almost comically audacious ambition for an operation with only
forty-six full-time employees - many of whom are barely old enough to
rent a car. But, with about eleven million dollars at its disposal, the
site is poised to break even on advertising revenue of somewhere between
six and ten million dollars annually. What most impresses advertisers -
and depresses newspaper-company executives - is the site's growth
numbers. In the past thirty days, thanks in large measure to the
excitement of the Democratic primaries, the site's "unique visitors" -
that is, individual computers that clicked on one of its pages - jumped
to more than eleven million, according to the company. And, according to
estimates from Nielsen NetRatings and comScore, the Huffington Post is
more popular than all but eight newspaper sites, rising from sixteenth
place in December.

Arthur Miller once described a good newspaper as "a nation talking to
itself". If only in this respect, the Huffington Post is a great
newspaper. It is not unusual for a short blog post to inspire a thousand
posts from readers - posts that go off in their own directions and lead
to arguments and conversations unrelated to the topic that inspired
them. Occasionally, these comments present original perspectives and
arguments, but many resemble the graffiti on a bathroom wall.

The notion that the Huffington Post is somehow going to compete with,
much less displace, the best traditional newspapers is arguable on other
grounds as well. The site's original-reporting resources are minuscule.
The site has no regular sports or book coverage, and its entertainment
section is a trashy grab bag of unverified Internet gossip. And, while
the Huffington Post has successfully positioned itself as the place
where progressive politicians and Hollywood liberal luminaries post
their anti-Bush Administration sentiments, many of the original blog
posts that it publishes do not merit the effort of even a mouse click.

Additional oddities abound. Whereas a newspaper tends to stand by its
story on the basis of an editorial process in which professional
reporters and editors attempt to vet their sources and check their
accuracy before publishing, the blogosphere relies on its readership -
its community - for quality control. At the Huffington Post, Jonah
Peretti explains, the editors "stand behind our front page" and do their
best to insure that only trusted bloggers and reliable news sources are
posted there. Most posts inside the site, however, go up before an
editor sees them. Only if a post is deemed by a reader to be false,
defamatory, or offensive does an editor get involved.

The Huffington Post's editorial processes are based on what Peretti has
named the "mullet strategy". ("Business up front, party in the back" is
how his trend-spotting site BuzzFeed glosses it.) "User-generated
content is all the rage, but most of it totally sucks", Peretti says.
The mullet strategy invites users to "argue and vent on the secondary
pages, but professional editors keep the front page looking sharp. The
mullet strategy is here to stay, because the best way for Web companies
to increase traffic is to let users have control, but the best way to
sell advertising is a slick, pretty front page where corporate sponsors
can admire their brands."

This policy is hardly without its pitfalls. During the Hurricane Katrina
crisis, the activist Randall Robinson referred, in a post, to reports
from New Orleans that some people there were "eating corpses to
survive". When Arianna Huffington heard about the post, she got in touch
with Robinson and found that he could not support his musings; she asked
Robinson to post a retraction. The alacrity with which the correction
took place was admirable, but it was not fast enough to prevent the
false information from being repeated elsewhere.

The tensions between the leaders of the mainstream media and the
challengers from the Web were presaged by one of the most instructive
and heated intellectual debates of the American twentieth century.

Between 1920 and 1925, the young Walter Lippmann published three books
investigating the theoretical relationship between democracy and the
press, including Public Opinion (1922), which is credited with inspiring
both the public-relations profession and the academic field of media
studies. Lippmann identified a fundamental gap between what we naturally
expect from democracy and what we know to be true about people.
Democratic theory demands that citizens be knowledgeable about issues
and familiar with the individuals put forward to lead them. And, while
these assumptions may have been reasonable for the white, male,
property-owning classes of James Franklin's Colonial Boston,
contemporary capitalist society had, in Lippmann's view, grown too big
and complex for crucial events to be mastered by the average citizen.

Journalism works well, Lippmann wrote, when "it can report the score of
a game or a transatlantic flight, or the death of a monarch". But where
the situation is more complicated, "as for example, in the matter of the
success of a policy, or the social conditions among a foreign people -
that is to say, where the real answer is neither yes or no, but subtle,
and a matter of balanced evidence", journalism "causes no end of
derangement, misunderstanding, and even misrepresentation".

Lippmann likened the average American - or "outsider", as he tellingly
named him - to a "deaf spectator in the back row" at a sporting event:
"He does not know what is happening, why it is happening, what ought to
happen", and "he lives in a world which he cannot see, does not
understand and is unable to direct". In a description that may strike a
familiar chord with anyone who watches cable news or listens to talk
radio today, Lippmann assumed a public that "is slow to be aroused and
quickly diverted ... and is interested only when events have been
melodramatized as a conflict". A committed élitist, Lippmann did not see
why anyone should find these conclusions shocking. Average citizens are
hardly expected to master particle physics or post-structuralism. Why
should we expect them to understand the politics of Congress, much less
that of the Middle East?

Lippmann's preferred solution was, in essence, to junk democracy
entirely. He justified this by arguing that the results were what
mattered. Even "if there were a prospect" that people could become
sufficiently well-informed to govern themselves wisely, he wrote, "it is
extremely doubtful whether many of us would wish to be bothered". In his
first attempt to consider the issue, in Liberty and the News (1920),
Lippmann suggested addressing the problem by raising the status of
journalism to that of more respected professions. Two years later, in
Public Opinion, he concluded that journalism could never solve the
problem merely by "acting upon everybody for thirty minutes in
twenty-four hours". Instead, in one of the oddest formulations of his
long career, Lippmann proposed the creation of "intelligence bureaus",
which would be given access to all the information they needed to judge
the government's actions without concerning themselves much with
democratic preferences or public debate. Just what, if any, role the
public would play in this process Lippmann never explained.

John Dewey termed Public Opinion "perhaps the most effective indictment
of democracy as currently conceived ever penned", and he spent much of
the next five years countering it. The result, published in 1927, was an
extremely tendentious, dense, yet important book, titled The Public and
Its Problems. Dewey did not dispute Lippmann's contention regarding
journalism's flaws or the public's vulnerability to manipulation. But
Dewey thought that Lippmann's cure was worse than the disease. While
Lippmann viewed public opinion as little more than the sum of the views
of each individual, much like a poll, Dewey saw it more like a focus
group. The foundation of democracy to Dewey was less information than
conversation. Members of a democratic society needed to cultivate what
the journalism scholar James W Carey, in describing the debate, called
"certain vital habits" of democracy - the ability to discuss, deliberate
on, and debate various perspectives in a manner that would move it
toward consensus.

Dewey also criticized Lippmann's trust in knowledge-based elites. "A
class of experts is inevitably so removed from common interests as to
become a class with private interests and private knowledge", he argued.
"The man who wears the shoe knows best that it pinches and where it
pinches, even if the expert shoemaker is the best judge of how the
trouble is to be remedied".

Lippmann and Dewey devoted much of the rest of their lives to addressing
the problems they had diagnosed, Lippmann as the archetypal insider
pundit and Dewey as the prophet of democratic education. To the degree
that posterity can be said to have declared a winner in this argument,
the future turned out much closer to Lippmann's ideal. Dewey's
confidence in democracy rested in significant measure on his "faith in
the capacity of human beings for intelligent judgment and action if
proper conditions are furnished". But nothing in his voluminous writings
gives the impression that he believed these conditions - which he
defined expansively to include democratic schools, factories, voluntary
associations, and, particularly, newspapers - were ever met in his
lifetime. (Dewey died in 1952, at the age of ninety-two.)

The history of the American press demonstrates a tendency toward exactly
the kind of professionalization for which Lippmann initially argued.
When Lippmann was writing, many newspapers remained committed to the
partisan model of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American press,
in which editors and publishers viewed themselves as appendages of one
or another political power or patronage machine and slanted their news
offerings accordingly. (Think of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton
battling each other through their competing newspapers while serving in
George Washington's Cabinet.) The twentieth-century model, in which
newspapers strive for political independence and attempt to act as
referees between competing parties on behalf of what they perceive to be
the public interest, was, in Lippmann's time, in its infancy.

As the profession grew more sophisticated and respected, in part owing
to Lippmann's example, top reporters, anchors, and editors naturally
rose in status to the point where some came to be considered the social
equals of the senators, Cabinet secretaries, and CEOs they reported on.
Just as naturally, these same reporters and editors sometimes came to
identify with their subjects, rather than with their readers, as Dewey
had predicted. Aside from biennial elections featuring smaller and
smaller portions of the electorate, politics increasingly became a
business for professionals and a spectator sport for the great unwashed
- much as Lippmann had hoped and Dewey had feared. Beyond the
publication of the occasional letter to the editor, the role of the
reader was defined as purely passive.

The Lippmann model received its initial challenge from the political
right. Many conservatives regarded the major networks, newspapers, and
newsweeklies - the mainstream media - as liberal arbiters, incapable of
covering without bias the civil-rights movement in the South or Barry
Goldwater's Presidential campaign. They responded by building think
tanks and media outlets designed both to challenge and to bypass the
mainstream media. The Reagan revolution, which brought conservatives to
power in Washington, had its roots not only in the candidate's personal
appeal as a "great communicator" but in a decades-long campaign of
ideological spadework undertaken in magazines such as William F Buckley,
Junior's National Review and Norman Podhoretz's Commentary and in the
pugnacious editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, edited for three
decades by Robert Bartley. The rise of what has come to be known as the
conservative "counter-establishment" and, later, of media phenomena such
as Rush Limbaugh, on talk radio, and Bill O'Reilly, on cable television,
can be viewed in terms of a Deweyan community attempting to seize the
reins of democratic authority and information from a Lippmann-like elite.

A liberal version of the Deweyan community took longer to form, in part
because it took liberals longer to find fault with the media. Until the
late nineteen-seventies, many in the mainstream media did, in fact,
exhibit the "liberal bias" with which conservatives continue to charge
them, regarding their unquestioned belief both in a strong, activist
government and in its moral responsibility to insure the expansion of
rights to women and to ethnic and racial minorities. But a concerted
effort to recruit pundits from the new conservative
counter-establishment, coupled with investment by wealthy right-wing
activists and businessmen in an interlocking web of
counter-establishment think tanks, pressure groups, periodicals, radio
stations, and television networks, operated as a kind of rightward
gravitational pull on the mainstream's reporting and helped to create a
far more sympathetic context for conservative candidates than Goldwater
supporters could have imagined.

Duncan Black, a former economics professor who writes a popular
progressive blog under the name Atrios, explains that he, too, believed
in what he calls "the myth of the liberal media". He goes on, "But
watching the press's collective behavior during the Clinton impeachment
saga, the Gore campaign, the post-9/11 era, the run-up to the Iraq war,
and the Bush Administration's absurd and dangerous claims of executive
power rendered such a belief absurd. Sixty-five per cent of the American
public disapproves of the Bush Administration, but that perspective,
even now, has very little representation anywhere in the mainstream media."

The birth of the liberal blogosphere, with its ability to bypass the big
media institutions and conduct conversations within a like-minded
community, represents a revival of the Deweyan challenge to our
Lippmann-like understanding of what constitutes "news" and, in doing so,
might seem to revive the philosopher's notion of a genuinely democratic
discourse. The Web provides a powerful platform that enables the
creation of communities; distribution is frictionless, swift, and cheap.
The old democratic model was a nation of New England towns filled with
well-meaning, well-informed yeoman farmers. Thanks to the Web, we can
all join in a Deweyan debate on Presidents, policies, and proposals. All
that's necessary is a decent Internet connection.

What put the Huffington Post on the map was a series of pieces during
the summer and autumn of 2005, in which Arianna Huffington relentlessly
attacked the military and foreign-affairs reporting of the Times' Judith
Miller. Huffington was fed by a steady stream of leaks and suggestions
from Times editors and reporters, even though much of the newspaper
world considered her journalistic credentials highly questionable.

The Huffington Post was hardly the first Web site to stumble on the
technique of leveraging the knowledge of its readers to challenge the
mainstream media narrative. For example, conservative bloggers at sites
like Little Green Footballs took pleasure in helping to bring down Dan
Rather after he broadcast dubious documents allegedly showing that
George W Bush had received special treatment during his service in the
Texas Air National Guard.

Long before the conservatives forced out Dan Rather, a liberal freelance
journalist named Joshua Micah Marshall had begun a site, called Talking
Points Memo, intended to take stories well beyond where mainstream
newspapers had taken them, often by relying on the voluntary research
and well-timed leaks of an avid readership. His site, begun during the
2000 Florida-recount controversy, ultimately spawned several related
sites, which are collectively known as TPM Media, and which are financed
through a combination of reader donations and advertising. In the
admiring judgment of the Columbia Journalism Review, Talking Points Memo
"was almost single-handedly responsible for bringing the story of the
fired US Attorneys to a boil", a scandal that ultimately ended with the
resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and a George Polk Award
for Marshall, the first ever for a blogger. Talking Points Memo also
played a lead role in defeating the Bush Social Security plan and in
highlighting Trent Lott's praise for Strom Thurmond's 1948
segregationist Presidential campaign. Lott was eventually forced to step
down as Senate Majority Leader.

According to Marshall, "the collaborative aspect" of his site "came
about entirely by accident". His original intention was merely to offer
his readers "transparency", so that his "strong viewpoint" would be
distinguishable from the facts that he presented. Over time, however, he
found that the enormous response that his work engendered offered access
to "a huge amount of valuable information" - information that was not
always available to mainstream reporters, who tended to deal largely
with what Marshall terms "professional sources". During the Katrina
crisis, for example, Marshall discovered that some of his readers worked
in the federal government's climate-and-weather-tracking infrastructure.
They provided him and the site with reliable reporting available nowhere
else.

Marshall's undeniable achievement notwithstanding, traditional newspaper
men and women tend to be unimpressed by the style of journalism
practiced at the political Web sites. Operating on the basis of a
Lippmann-like reverence for inside knowledge and contempt for those who
lack it, many view these sites the way serious fiction authors might
view the "novels" tapped out by Japanese commuters on their cell phones.
Real reporting, especially the investigative kind, is expensive, they
remind us. Aggregation and opinion are cheap.

And it is true: no Web site spends anything remotely like what the best
newspapers do on reporting. Even after the latest round of new cutbacks
and buyouts are carried out, the Times will retain a core of more than
twelve hundred newsroom employees, or approximately fifty times as many
as the Huffington Post. The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times
maintain between eight hundred and nine hundred editorial employees
each. The Times' Baghdad bureau alone costs around three million dollars
a year to maintain. And while the Huffington Post shares the benefit of
these investments, it shoulders none of the costs.

Despite the many failures at newspapers, the vast majority of reporters
and editors have devoted years, even decades, to understanding the
subjects of their stories. It is hard to name any bloggers who can match
the professional expertise, and the reporting, of, for example, the
Post's Barton Gellman and Dana Priest, or the Times' Dexter Filkins and
Alissa Rubin.

In October, 2005, at an advertisers' conference in Phoenix, Bill Keller
complained that bloggers merely "recycle and chew on the news",
contrasting that with the Times' emphasis on what he called "a
'journalism of verification', " rather than mere "assertion".

"Bloggers are not chewing on the news. They are spitting it out",
Arianna Huffington protested in a Huffington Post blog. Like most
liberal bloggers, she takes exception to the assumption by so many
traditional journalists that their work is superior to that of bloggers
when it comes to ferreting out the truth. The ability of bloggers to
find the flaws in the mainstream media's reporting of the Iraq war
"highlighted the absurdity of the knee jerk comparison of the relative
credibility of the so-called MSM and the blogosphere", she said, and
went on, "In the run-up to the Iraq war, many in the mainstream media,
including the New York Times, lost their veneer of unassailable
trustworthiness for many readers and viewers, and it became clear that
new media sources could be trusted - and indeed are often much quicker
at correcting mistakes than old media sources".

But Huffington fails to address the parasitical relationship that
virtually all Internet news sites and blog commentators enjoy with
newspapers. The Huffington Post made a gesture in the direction of
original reporting and professionalism last year when it hired Thomas
Edsall, a forty-year veteran of the Washington Post and other papers, as
its political editor. At the time he was approached by the Huffington
Post, Edsall said, he felt that the Post had become "increasingly driven
by fear - the fear of declining readership, the fear of losing
advertisers, the fear of diminishing revenues, the fear of being swamped
by the Internet, the fear of irrelevance. Fear drove the paper, from top
to bottom, to corrupt the entire news operation." Joining the Huffington
Post, Edsall said, was akin to "getting out of jail", and he has
written, ever since, with a sense of liberation. But such examples are rare.

And so even if one agrees with all of Huffington's jabs at the Times,
and Edsall's critique of the Washington Post, it is impossible not to
wonder what will become of not just news but democracy itself, in a
world in which we can no longer depend on newspapers to invest their
unmatched resources and professional pride in helping the rest of us to
learn, however imperfectly, what we need to know.

In a recent episode of The Simpsons, a cartoon version of Dan Rather
introduced a debate panel featuring "Ron Lehar, a print journalist from
the Washington Post". This inspired Bart's nemesis Nelson to shout, "Haw
haw! Your medium is dying!"

"Nelson!" Principal Skinner admonished the boy.

"But it is!" was the young man's reply.

Nelson is right. Newspapers are dying; the evidence of diminishment in
economic vitality, editorial quality, depth, personnel, and the over-all
number of papers is everywhere. What this portends for the future is
complicated. Three years ago, Rupert Murdoch warned newspaper editors,
"Many of us have been remarkably, unaccountably complacent ... quietly
hoping that this thing called the digital revolution would just limp
along". Today, almost all serious newspapers are scrambling to adapt
themselves to the technological and community-building opportunities
offered by digital news delivery, including individual blogs, video
reports, and "chat" opportunities for readers. Some, like the Times and
the Post, will likely survive this moment of technological
transformation in different form, cutting staff while increasing their
depth and presence online. Others will seek to focus themselves locally.
Newspaper editors now say that they "get it". Yet traditional
journalists are blinkered by their emotional investment in their
Lippmann-like status as insiders. They tend to dismiss not only most
blogosphere-based criticisms but also the messy democratic ferment from
which these criticisms emanate. The Chicago Tribune recently felt
compelled to shut down comment boards on its Web site for all political
news stories. Its public editor, Timothy J McNulty, complained, not
without reason, that "the boards were beginning to read like a community
of foul-mouthed bigots".

Arianna Huffington, for her part, believes that the online and the print
newspaper model are beginning to converge: "As advertising dollars
continue to move online - as they slowly but certainly are - HuffPost
will be adding more and more reporting and the Times and Post model will
continue with the kinds of reporting they do, but they'll do more of it
originally online". She predicts "more vigorous reporting in the future
that will include distributed journalism - wisdom-of-the-crowd reporting
of the kind that was responsible for the exposing of the Attorneys
General firing scandal". As for what may be lost in this transition, she
is untroubled: "A lot of reporting now is just piling on the
conventional wisdom - with important stories dying on the front page of
the New York Times".

The survivors among the big newspapers will not be without support from
the nonprofit sector. ProPublica, funded by the liberal billionaires
Herb and Marion Sandler and headed by the former Wall Street Journal
managing editor Paul Steiger, hopes to provide the mainstream media with
the investigative reporting that so many have chosen to forgo. The
Center for Independent Media, headed by David Bennahum, a former writer
at Wired, recently hired Jefferson Morley, from the Washington Post, and
Allison Silver, a former editor at both the Los Angeles Times and the
New York Times, to oversee a Web site called the Washington Independent.
It's one of a family of news-blogging sites meant to pick up some of the
slack left by declining staffs in local and Washington reporting, with
the hope of expanding everywhere. But to imagine that philanthropy can
fill all the gaps arising from journalistic cutbacks is wishful thinking.

And so we are about to enter a fractured, chaotic world of news,
characterized by superior community conversation but a decidedly
diminished level of first-rate journalism. The transformation of
newspapers from enterprises devoted to objective reporting to a cluster
of communities, each engaged in its own kind of "news" - and each with
its own set of "truths" upon which to base debate and discussion - will
mean the loss of a single national narrative and agreed-upon set of
"facts" by which to conduct our politics. News will become increasingly
"red" or "blue". This is not utterly new. Before Adolph Ochs took over
the Times, in 1896, and issued his famous "without fear or favor"
declaration, the American scene was dominated by brazenly partisan
newspapers. And the news cultures of many European nations long ago
embraced the notion of competing narratives for different political
communities, with individual newspapers reflecting the views of each
faction. It may not be entirely coincidental that these nations enjoy a
level of political engagement that dwarfs that of the United States.

The transformation will also engender serious losses. By providing what
Bill Keller, of the Times, calls the "serendipitous encounters that are
hard to replicate in the quicker, reader-driven format of a Web site" -
a difference that he compares to that "between a clock and a calendar" -
newspapers have helped to define the meaning of America to its citizens.
To choose one date at random, on the morning of Monday, February 11th, I
picked up the paper-and-ink New York Times on my doorstep, and, in
addition to the stories one could have found anywhere - Obama defeating
Clinton again and the Bush Administration's decision to seek the death
penalty for six Guantánamo detainees - the front page featured a unique
combination of articles, stories that might disappear from our
collective consciousness were there no longer any institution to
generate and publish them. These included a report from Nairobi, by
Jeffrey Gettleman, on the effect of Kenya's ethnic violence on the
country's middle class; a dispatch from Doha, by Tamar Lewin, on the
growth of American university campuses in Qatar; and, in a scoop that
was featured on the Huffington Post's politics page and excited much of
the blogosphere that day, a story, by Michael R Gordon, about the
existence of a study by the RAND Corporation which offered a harsh
critique of the Bush Administration's performance in Iraq. The
juxtaposition of these disparate topics forms both a baseline of
knowledge for the paper's readers and a picture of the world they
inhabit. In Imagined Communities (1983), an influential book on the
origins of nationalism, the political scientist Benedict Anderson
recalls Hegel's comparison of the ritual of the morning paper to that of
morning prayer: "Each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he
performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions)
of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he
has not the slightest notion". It is at least partially through the
"imagined community" of the daily newspaper, Anderson writes, that
nations are forged.

Finally, we need to consider what will become of those people, both at
home and abroad, who depend on such journalistic enterprises to keep
them safe from various forms of torture, oppression, and injustice.
"People do awful things to each other", the veteran war photographer
George Guthrie says in "Night and Day", Tom Stoppard's 1978 play about
foreign correspondents. "But it's worse in places where everybody is
kept in the dark". Ever since James Franklin's New England Courant
started coming off the presses, the daily newspaper, more than any other
medium, has provided the information that the nation needed if it was to
be kept out of "the dark". Just how an Internet-based news culture can
spread the kind of "light" that is necessary to prevent terrible things,
without the armies of reporters and photographers that newspapers have
traditionally employed, is a question that even the most ardent democrat
in John Dewey's tradition may not wish to see answered.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/31/080331fa_fact_alterman?currentPage=all


TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click
on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this
essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/