Bad News

So the newspaper industry is going down the tubes, with The Tribune Company declaring bankruptcy (after over-leveraging to purchase newspapers and then shearing off high-quality newsroom talent to try and pay the debt), McClatchy putting The Miami Herald up for sale (staggering under debt used to purchase Knight-Ridder newspapers), and The New York Times taking out a loan against their brand new (super expensive) building like some 2000-2007 homeowner using his house as an ATM.

Why-oh-why are the newspapers dying? Is it the Internet, with Craigslist killing the classified ad business? Could the newspapers have been proactive and cornered that market? Is it the Internet, with its audience expecting to read all the news that's fit to click for free? Is it the Internet, with its real-time reporting on news event?

Maybe, or maybe it was TV before that, or maybe nobody really reads anymore, or maybe the newspapers are cutting the very things that they can do better than everyone else in the first place: in-depth reporting. When you cut the more expensive, i.e. more experienced, reporters, you cut not just the heart but the quality out of the newspaper.

I don't read The Los Angeles Times for the graphic layout, I read it because I want a reflective news experience, the kind you only get with print. That paper is thinner now, with fewer in-depth articles bringing important issues to light, with a Sunday paper that no longer has separate sections for op-eds or book reviews, and a magazine that only comes once a month and then has to built around some sort of sales initiative, like fashion or travel.

Tina Brown, who's Daily Beast website just debuted recently, is even harsher, and since she's been in that biz for ages, she should know:

As great newspapers, magazines, TV networks, and publishing houses dismember themselves around us, it would be marginally consoling if the pink slips were going to those who contributed so vigorously to their companies’ accelerating demise—the feckless zombies at the head of corporate bureaucracies who cared only about the next quarter’s numbers, never troubled to understand the DNA of the companies they took over, and installed swarms of “Business Affairs” drones to oversee and torment the people “under” them. There are floors of these creatures in any behemoth media company, buzzing about each day thwarting new ideas or, worse, having “transformative” ideas of their own when what is usually required is to revive, with a bit of steadfast conviction, the originating creative purpose of the enterprise. It’s the same with the auto companies.

It gets tougher from there, clearly written from experience, including the inability to actually get a meeting with or response from the business affairs types who are doing the dismembering. These papers may be profitable but its not enough in today's day and age, profits have to be big, because they're just "assets" that create "product".

I firmly believe the blogosphere requires real newspaper reporting sources so there's truth to find and link to, but maybe there will be a new age where real journalism grows in an Internet-only (or Internet-to-TV) format. For those of us who like to read letters off reflected light with our early morning tea or coffee, it just won't be the same.

What we lose in journalism, let's just hope we can save in trees.