|
FROM THE EDITOR
The Dying Dailies
‘News hole’ once meant the space in a paper for news. It may become what we’re left with.
By Ray McAllister
The last time I was in the newsroom of The Richmond Times-Dispatch was Halloween of 2007, less than a year and a half ago.
Oh, what a difference an eternity makes.
Several years of sustained non-replacement-hiring, coupled with the first layoffs since the merger of Richmond’s two daily papers in 1992, have left a skeleton crew. That’s what people I know say, anyway — those who haven’t left. (That the product is still as good as it is speaks of the talent of the survivors. Trust me: Many of these people are very good.)
Richmond is hardly alone. Look at almost any daily paper. It is thinner and has less local reporting, or at least less aggressive local reporting. For much of this decade, newspapers reduced staff, trying to “do more with less,” as the self-deluding expression goes. Reporters had to cover additional topics — and file separate stories for the Web.
Oh, yeah. That makes for good journalism.
Readers notice. I spent four and a half days at Richmond’s Bizarre Bazaar Christmas show selling books, giving away Boomer Life — and listening to newspaper talk. I heard over and over and over again how grateful people are to be able to read the Times-Dispatch columnists again in our magazine. (Our pleasure. We now have six with the addition of Jann Malone this issue.)
Their gratitude, though, often disintegrated into diatribes against The Times-Dispatch. No columnists. No news. Too thin. Fewer sections. Those partial-page wraparounds. (Boy, do people hate those.) Many no longer subscribe. Nearly all feel a sense of betrayal, as if the paper turned its back on them.
The sense of betrayal is understandable.
But not entirely fair.
Yes, I’m still defensive. I spent 33 years there, cared about my work and found that nearly everyone did, too. I remain oddly unamused when someone calls the paper The Times-Disgrace. (Very clever, people, but hear it 1,000 times and it really doesn’t sound as much like Noël Coward as you think.)
No, I’m hardly enamored of every newspaper change made over the past three or four years. No one with a brain would be. My guess, though, is that no one in management arbitrarily decided: “Let’s give the people less news and a smaller paper — less of what they want, generally — and then charge more for it!”
To those of us bleeding printer’s ink, all this is hard to believe. Love ’em or hate ’em, newspapers were an important part of Americans’ lives — and recognized as such. Not government, not big business, not the competition of radio, not the competition of television could take them down.
But along came the Internet. 
And along came a younger generation.
Baby boomers and seniors still will read a newspaper they hold in their hands, just as we will still buy CDs to listen to music. Not so the younger generations. Information comes through a laptop, a cell phone, an iPod. It comes in bits and bytes and without organization, Britney Spears as weighty as the economic meltdown or the Gaza Strip.
Newspapers moved their product to the Internet, trying to serve both audiences — as if that would work. Net users want it for free … so just try collecting for subscriptions from them.
Advertisers began pulling out of the paper. They didn’t necessarily go to the online version, or, if they did, they paid far less. Newspapers were “trading print dollars for Internet pennies,” in the new parlance. It doesn’t pay the bills.
In 2007, Times-Dispatch publisher Tom Silvestri gave a speech to other newspaper execs. He asked them to envision a world in which daily papers might print only one or two days a week. It was shocking and yet … plausible. When friends asked me about the industry’s future, I started speculating there might be weekend-only print papers. When? Within five to 10 years. They seemed surprised and, in truth, I was hardly sure it would happen that soon.
At many papers, it may be this year.
The Christian Science Monitor announced recently that it was changing from a daily to a weekly. The New York Times — more on “The Gray Lady” in a moment — has unleashed an advertising blitz to sell a Friday-through-Sunday package. The two Detroit dailies announced they would continue to print daily papers but would offer home delivery only on Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays. People inside The Times-Dispatch say that only the Sunday paper can be called truly healthy. And on and on.
The current issue of The Atlantic magazine — in an article headlined “End Times: Can America’s paper of record survive the death of newsprint? Can journalism?” — postulates it is “certainly plausible” that The New York Times could go out of business by May.
Others call that alarmist. But nobody is predicting this whole thing will end well for the print industry. Tom Brokaw, the former NBC anchor and chronicler of generations (The Greatest Generation, Boom!), was asked recently about the demise of dailies. Brokaw, a true news guy, lamented it deeply. He said, though, that there would always be a need for the work done by reporters and editors.
Ah, but there’s the rub. Who will do it? Real reporting — investigative or the merely thorough — takes resources. It takes reporters, editors, and lots of them. It takes money. The money is drying up, and nobody is talking about any government bailout for this industry. There will be an especially large hole in local reporting.
So let’s figure out exactly who will do the spadework to find waste, corruption, fraud, unfairness and mere ineptitude in government. In business. In society.
Web sites? There are a few with real staffs doing real work — but not many.
Bloggers? You mean those people who rant off the top of their head? (To the five percent who don’t, I apologize.)
TV? Puh-leeze. Local TV stations everywhere have a proud history of repackaging their local papers. (By the way, you have noticed all the cutbacks at networks and local stations, too, haven’t you?)
It hardly matters. Readers and advertisers have reached the irreversible conclusion that newspapers are no longer needed. The seven-day-a-week, hold-in-your-hand daily newspaper is headed for extinction, the date of death probably being sooner rather than later. When it comes, there may be only one thing left to say:
Oops.
~~~~~
REMEMBER JEFFERSON’S TAKE?
“Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
How about the Internet, T.J.?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Contact
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
.
For more on his books, visit www.RayMcAllisterBooks.com.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
IN THIS ISSUE (FEBRUARY/MARCH 2009)
Bill Bevins’ regular interview piece, this time with Petersburg’s celebrity couple, Tim and Daphne Maxwell Reid, was so good we decided to blow it up as one of our main features. The Reids have both interesting and important things to say. Joan Tupponce has added a nice intro on the fate of the Reids’ New Millennium Studios. (Joan, by the way, does double dipping with a fun story on boomers and … dancing.)
Lisa Antonelli Bacon reports on four local power women — “Boomers and Shakers” — and, while there are certainly similarities in their stories, the article shows exceptional people can make a difference in a variety of ways. Lisa Schaffner shows how each one of us can, too.
Randy Cost writes about making defensive investments in a bad economy. Diane York writes firsthand about having cosmetic surgery.
There are plenty of fun pieces. Bill Millsaps writes about the days when basketball shorts were actually short. Betty Booker and Randy Fitzgerald take looks at Valentine’s and romance. Sande Snead writes about boomer bands. David Menzies writes about the classic Corvette — with an assist from Steve Clark on the local scene.
Too many more to talk about. Dive in!
THE BOTTOM LINE: We can read whatever we want on the Internet. But what’s to make us read what we need?
|
