The Isthmus cover story for the week explores the declining state of print journalism, coming to a conclusion that is becoming increasingly obvious: print journalism in its traditional form is dying. Ice delivery agencies in the age of refrigerators, buggy repair shops in the time of automobiles, the newspapers are disbanding in the face of the electronic age. Century-old local papers have been folding for years in small towns across America, the infection then climbing up the media organism into the regional presses until now the national leviathans are feeling the grip of fever. Ah but good riddance, you might think, get out of the market if you can’t compete, we all get our news off the Internet and cable news these days anyway.
The problem is two fold. First, electronic media and television appear to be becoming more and more biased in order to make a profit. There just aren’t ratings appealing to the moderates while there is a distinct advantage to spinning further and further to the left and right. It’s a similar trend to that we see in countries with high ethnic fractionalization: the extremists more vehemently care about policy, so appealing to them has more direct and immediate benefit, though it occurs on a slippery slope. Second, without big money behind journalism sources, we lose the societal benefit of investigation and information gathering. Google News is a great aggregator and you might like the cut of those writers jibes on the Huffington Post, but neither site has the capital to send a correspondent to a foreign country to figure out what the hell is going on. And while citizen journalism is a powerful force in its own right, it cannot completely fill the shoes of the old news monoliths. The concentration of power in a major newspaper allows it to go toe to toe when necessary with the power invested in government or corporate entities. If Woodward and Bernstein had just been bloggers, Nixon could have buried them, but with The Washington Post at their backs they were untouchable.
How can journalism evolve without sacrificing wholesale the benefits of old style and new style news?
A simple proposal would be to look to a nonprofit sort of model based on higher learning. Think of the New York Times as an institution not as a business. Think of local papers surviving because they are supported by an endowment and the long term valuation by donors instead of the short term profit of selling shoe store ads. Consider the force of a journalist with tenure. What could be more important to a free society than the guarding of positions of those who speak truth to power?
