Those of us who live in communities without newspapers won’t realize how much we’ve lost until something really bad happens, like our schools lose accreditation or local politicians steal us blind.
Newspapers are how communities have talked to themselves. You followed how the high school teams were doing. Learned how your city council proposed to spend your money. You had people called reporters, who wandered around asking impertinent questions. Questions necessary to a free society.
When newspapers totally disappear from places like Ann Arbor, where the paper is closing July 23, or Rochester and West Bloomfield and Troy, where the papers are closing at the end of this week, those communities will be harmed.
Too many people will have little idea what is going on where they live. Nor will they have the faintest idea how to find out.
Yes, we will always be able to find national news on the Internet, such as today‘s announcement that Sonia Sotomayor is being nominated for the U.S. Supreme Court. But who will help us sort out and make sense of what’s happening closer to home?
Yes, we have blogs. But with a few exceptions, bloggers are not trained journalists who know how to read city budgets, for example. Journalists are people who know how to get information and present it fairly. At the same time, part of their job is to highlight the essential while condensing or leaving out the non-essential stuff.
That‘s what newspapers have always done. They have served as filters and gatekeepers who put the information we need to know into coherent and manageable packages.
Now, I know that what’s important is not the physical form of how we get that information. Yes, I still like newsprint. But I also know the reason so many railroads went out of business is because their executives thought they were in the railroad business. They forgot they were really in the transportation business.
Newspapers need to realize they are in the community information business, and must find a way of delivering that information in a form that will both reach the public and make a profit.
It is hip and trendy to be high-tech. But even printed newspapers may not be dead. Last month, the Hamtramck Citizen went out of business. The community started a successor, the Review. After Gannett, the nation’s biggest newspaper corporation, announced the Birmingham Eccentric was going to close at the end of this month, the citizens protested. And last weekend the paper won a reprieve. It will keep publishing, at least for a few months, while the staff scrambles to get new subscribers.
I don’t know any magic formula for dealing with invisible crises. But the first step has to be making people see that they are there.
We should get one of those wimpy liberal types or conservative bigots like Ben Stein to pen a column about the pathological and behavioral shortcomings of the those in the media industry that lead to the demise and implosion of this industry..
These media sociologists could attack the dna of reporters, pundits and find out why they continued to fail and ignore thier own shortcomings..
The denial, deflection and shallow quality of those in the media industry created thier own demise..
Perhaps now we can really communicate with each other without the prejudice, bias, fiction, disinformation, propaganda, ignorance, shallowness of the media industry..
Good riddance Old School Media..You can harm no more..
Posted by: Thrasher | May 27, 2009 at 09:40 AM
There could be an analogy drawn between what is happening with newspapers and the auto industry. Both have suffered from greed and increasing complacency. Newspapers have attempted to drastically cut back on doing the expensive and difficult investigative reporting (that they should be doing)while still charging the same for advertising and classifieds. While the Detroit auto companies, similarly, just wanted to rake in the money without having to do major investments in new vehicle designs, training and technologies and while continuing to charge the same and more for the same-old types of vehicles.
But we can also blame the traditional classified/advertising model of funding newspapers which is no longer tenable or relevant. I believe what newspapers will need to in the future is to get back to basics, get rid of some of the large number of "feature", "staff" and "freelance" writers and return to doing more "hard news" (which can't be done by "citizen journalists" and bloggers) while, at the same time, rewarding their readers with deals they can ONLY GET by buying THEIR papers. Advertisers would then get dedicated newspaper subscribers who would also be dedicated and repeat customers. So, rather than relying on the traditional, mass, "push marketing", businesses will have use a lot more "pull marketing" that will be exclusive to certain types of media. I think something like this would guarantee businesses customers, while guaranteeing publishers advertising revenue. If you think about it, this is kind like what medical insurance is to hospitals - groups of patients buy insurance at discounted rates and medical providers get guaranteed customers that only get discounted services if they use the services of those specific providers. In other words, a social contract gets re-established between newspapers, businesses and the public.
Posted by: George | May 28, 2009 at 04:33 PM