Having been laid off instead of resigning, as the editors cited there were, I'm not in exactly the same place as those editors, but the article gave me a chance to muse about the state of my chosen profession. It's not a happy place. He asked for my thoughts. Here's what I replied to my friend:
Interesting article, but I'm not convinced that digital competition is the whole reason for newspapers' decline, especially at the small-town, small-daily level. Other factors are the loss of community involvement resulting from so much corporate ownership, the well-documented decline in the reading habit, especially among younger generations, and newspapers' failure to focus on real news.
Yes, local is the bottom line. You've got to cover the local news. But local news isn't all chicken dinners and Man of the Year Awards and Little League sports. It's also local government and local events of importance and impact and magnitude. What does the global economic meltdown mean to Wilson businesses and individuals? ... Coverage of government and political news is an obligation. It's a requirement of democracy; you can't have a true democracy without a well-informed electorate. And people who used to be able to get an overview of the world from their daily newspapers don't like the omission of so many stories from outside the local area.
The problem has been building for years. Newspapers noticed a loss of audience to television, so they tried to become television, ignoring the important but hard-to-report and hard-to-explain news and opting in favor of fluff and visuals instead. Standards were lowered. And a lot of newspapers were arrogant, having driven out the competition and won a monopoly in their markets. They thought they were invincible.
All the bloggers' gripes about the Mainstream Media are based on the condescension, arrogance, bias and incompetence of way too many people at larger papers and the TV networks.
Digital competition has to be dealt with, but it's not the whole problem. Larger papers were dependent upon their classified revenue,which has largely disappeared to Craigslist and similar sites. Retail advertising has also shifted to TV and Web pages. Newspapers have to adjust to this new reality, but such drastic reductions in newsroom staffing shouldn't be necessary and will ultimately be self-defeating. But corporate owners don't care that the people of Podunk won't be well-informed about the school board election; they only care that the earnings statement and stock price are down.
What would I do if I were in the situation of these former editors? (I do wish I'd had their six-figure incomes.) Maybe the same thing they did. A very good journalist I had hired right out of college, who is now ... [an] editor ... , told me he was looking for a non-newspaper job. He said the ... newsroom was about half staffed, and everyone who was left was young and had no institutional memory. He said he lived in fear that some huge error would make it into the paper because the people there just don't know the history.
It's a bad feeling to be in a dying industry.
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1 comment:
Not sure where the W-S Journal falls in this category of small-town vs. large paper, but this is a sentiment that I share with you. We've come full circle and are in need of less global (frightening!) and more local news.
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