Suicide bombers in the newsroom

It's sad to me what is happening to the newspaper business. I'm no longer in the profession, but I spent most of my adult life in it. Journalism was a challenging, rewarding (though not necessarily in the monetary sense) and exciting career. Emphasize "was."

Newspapers across the country are closing or cutting back on staff and pages. Advertisers, despite the lack of hard evidence that Internet advertising is truly effective, are abandoning print ads for the "new media." With the fractionalizing of Internet, magazine and television audiences, newspapers stand out as the last remaining "mass medium," capable of attracting a broad and diverse audience. Even though circulation at most newspapers is falling precipitously, newspaper audiences remain diverse, educated, involved and affluent. They're the perfect target for advertisers.

Newspaper executives don't seem to know what to do. To save costs — and in some cases to preserve high profit margins — they are cutting the heart out of newspapers. If newspapers aren't going to be NEWSpapers, they have little reason to exist. They can't deliver the eyeballs for advertisers unless their news product attracts readers. Otherwise, they're just "shoppers" — the advertising-only fliers that found some temporary success a generation ago.

Too many newspaper executives are not news people. Either they came up on the business side — selling ads or running circulation — or they came from other industries and figured reporting news must be just like making widgets. For them, cutting back on news staff makes perfect sense as a response to a loss of revenues. What worked on the vacuum cleaner assembly line should work at the newspaper, they figure. As a result, newsrooms around the country are being decimated, and readers are being delivered a lesser product — one without the quantity and quality of news that once made the paper a good, even essential, purchase.

The latest episode in this denigration of the news and ignoring of the readers' interests and the principles of journalism comes from the Dallas Morning News. A memo from the guys in the penthouse offices announces that reporters and editors will now be reporting to ad salesmen. Ideas like this one, flavored with consultants' favorite cliches, such as "convergence," "paradigm shift" and "symbiotic," are typical of the idiocy of people who know nothing of journalistic principles and the hazards of betraying public trust. Back in the day when a half-dozen hometown grocery stores took out a full page ad every week, a former colleague commented that if pleasing advertisers was what newspapers did, we'd run a front-page story every week on the latest specials at the Piggly-Wiggly. Supermarkets aren't as dominant now, but it's easy to imagine the Dallas paper doing big stories on the latest model at the Chrysler dealer or the new shoes at Neiman Marcus. Advertisers — and the ad salesmen who gain the commissions on ad sales — will be pleased, but readers will not be fooled. Readers will have one more reason to distrust and abandon the "mainstream media."

The decline of newspapers is profoundly sad to me and potentially tragic for a democracy that depends upon an informed electorate, but this decline is, at least in part, a self-inflicted wound.