In Friday's (May 23) Washington Post Business section there was a story by Frank Ahrens, "More Than 100 Post Journalists Take Buyout," the third round of these, which will reduce the staff from about 780 to around 700. This is in response to declininig circulation, which peaked at 832,232 in 1993 and is now down to 638,300. Among those taking these early retirements and not being replaced are Pulitzer Prize winning foreign correspondent Thomas Ricks, even better in my view foreign correspondent Nora Boustany, Pulitzer Prize winning movie critic Steven Hunter, music critic Tim Page, and Maralee Schwartz and Tony Reid from the Business section. The most prominent retiree will be the increasingly blovious David Broder, although he will still lurk about "on contract." Brad Delong may crow about the "death spiral" of the Post (and the NY Times), but I am not at all. This will be a severe loss as Americans will be further cut off from independent reporting of foreign news events. The coverage of such events in the American media is already about as limited and distorted as what one used to get if one lived in the USSR.
I am someone who gets WaPo delivered to my door in Harrisonburg, VA. If it were to go the alternatives would be the Washington Times and the Harrisonburg Daily News-Record. The latter is quite reasonably moving towards covering mostly local news. While its editorial page writer has gone off the deep end, putting himself far to the right of George W. Bush on global warming, among other things, at least the DNR has an array of views presented in the columnists who appear there, whereas the WT is so uniform in its columnists it makes Fox News look like Le Monde Diplomatique. As it is, I fear that WaPo has decided to become a local Washington newspaper, which at least means there might still be good coverage of national political news from there, even if its global and other coverage deteriorates further.
I note another issue of relevance to Brad Delong and bloggers. There is this idea in the blogosphere that it will replace the print media. However, I note that much of what appears in blogs ultimately comes from the print media. I was made all too aware of this several years ago when on maxspeak I broke the story of the mistreatment by federal prosecutors of the Harrisonburg Kurds. This blew all over the world, but many, such as the Volokh Conspiracy, questioned whether it was even happening. Was I lying? It was not until we could find a small back page story from the Harrisonburg Daily News-Record confirming that there was a prosecution of Kurds (and which totally reflected the prosecution's view), that the blogosphere accepted that this was really going on, and in the end the blowback from the blogosphere then played a role in bringing print media attention in Harrisonburg and elsewhere to what was going on, eventually leading to a much more favorable outcome in the courts.
But why does international news have to come come to the United States via one of a few Big Media institutions on the east coast of the United States?
ReplyDeleteCouldn't expat bloggers be passing on the local news reports from the countries where they are living? And couldn't academics who specialize in the culture and politics of foreign countries be passing along the first hand reports from their contacts abroad?
Granted the better websites would be those which screened and front paged enough uncompensated posters to keep a steady supply of material appearing so there would be a need for some systemization of the process. That seems a better model than having D.C. area department stores and car dealers, the Riggs Bank and Boeing buy ads which sponsor foreign correspondents who are overseen by an editorial board, a board which is subject to all sorts of unseen influences.
the role of advertising and changing consumer life style is underreported in stories about the current situation in the newspaper business
ReplyDeletethe "news" business has been changing and the role of paper delivery of the news to the home has been steadily declining
the afternoon newspapers went out of business when people started watching tv and advertisers saw another way to reach consumers
the morning newspapers began to lose readers as more and more people used cars to get to work
the morning newspapers lost readers and advertisers when they lost their monopoly over stcok prices and classified ads
craig's list, ebay, etc...
my son looked for his apartment on craig's list
a friend of mine has an auction business
he used to hold auctions every teusday
now he puts his auction goods on e-bay
I look forward to the demise of newsPAPERS. I live in a state that has been clearfelling vast areas of native forest for decades, most of which is used to produce woodchip for paper and packaging. Do you know how many trees are destroyed for a single edition of the New York Times?
ReplyDeleteI think the internet (with sun-powered computers) will be the only viable way to access news in the future. The world's forests and land/water resources can't sustain the old paradigm of paper print.
Now those who recite this Sutra and then try to put it in practice will accumulate merit as countless as the sands of Arizona and Nevada.
Will help save the planet Earth from total oil slick.
Will enter the age of harmony of man and nature.
Will win the tender love and caresses of men, women, and beasts.
Will always have ripe blackberries to eat and a sunny spot under a pine tree to sit at.
AND IN THE END WILL WIN HIGHEST PERFECT ENLIGHTENMENT.
thus have we heard.
[Gary Snyder]
An online poll this year in America showed that nearly half of the respondents said their primary source of news and information is the Net.
See:
More Americans turning to Web for News. Reuters
Published on ZDNet News: Feb 29, 2008 9:18:00 AM
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-6232574.html
In Australia the media empires heavily invest in this incredibly destructive pulp and paper industry. I think this situation, unfortunately, is a global phenomenon.
Barkley Rosser wrote:
ReplyDeleteThere is this idea in the blogosphere that it will replace the print media. However, I note that much of what appears in blogs ultimately comes from the print media.
In the Frontline special News War, a case was made in part three for just what you said. Journalism cannot run on volunteers and charity. It requires paid work and institutional resources. If the standard is basic journalism, what is the viable blog model?
Robert Cringley argues that internet journalism simply has not measured up:
I have been writing for the World Wide Web since April 1997, which is about as long as anyone on continuous duty can claim. That's 480+ columns, totaling just over 800,000 words (at least one version of the King James Bible, by contrast, has 783,137 words). Every one of those words, by the way (mine, not the Bible's) can be found in my archive and a few of them might even be worth reading. But my point isn't that I have written so much, or that I am so old and decrepit in Internet years, but simply that I can make a fair claim to knowing how news gets spread around on the Internet -- not very well. The Internet is, in fact, the idiot savant of journalism -- supremely good at a thing or two and not at all good at anything else.
This belief of mine is confirmed, somewhat, by a recent study from the University of Notre Dame that says news stories survive on the Web for an average of 36 hours before half of their eventual readers have read them. This is in contrast with traditional print newspapers that -- since most are published on a daily basis -- are typically read by half their readers in 24 hours or less.
So news lives longer on the Web. Is this good or bad? The news stories about this news study tended to view the result as an oddity, noting that most people expected the half-life of news to actually be shorter on the web than in print, not longer. It's that speedy electrons thing. But as a columnist I'm actually paid to have opinions and mine in this case is that this news stickiness is bad, very bad, because it means we read less and ultimately learn less than we did in the past.
Oh we think we're so smart, with our Google News homepages and our online subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal. More and more of us are getting our news from the Internet and that's hurting newspapers and ultimately hurting us, too, because we are getting less news overall.
Newspapers, because they are printed daily, have a lifespan of one day. And because they generally have several stories on each page, we have the opportunity to SCAN the news in parallel. These are two huge advantages of print journalism over its electronic counterpart. In newspapers, news gets out of the way at the end of each day, leaving room for more news. On the Internet, we're still talking about that safe landing of the Space Shuttle Discovery 48 hours after it happened. Okay, they're down, get on with it. So people who get their news from the Internet may know a lot about Britney Spears' attitude toward child car seats, but they don't know about many other things because of all that Britney news cluttering the ether.
Internet news also tends to be serial. The New York Times, for example, has an average of 25 stories each day in its business section and every one of those stories can be read online. But only a handful are presented as headlines in the Times web edition. So unless you are very diligent about ferreting it out, at least 75 percent of the Times' business content is invisible and unread online.
Yes, we can get our Internet news straight from Kazakhstan if we want to, but most of us don't have the language skills or the gumption. We rely, instead, on aggregators, mainly newspapers, which are again aggregated by outfits like Google News. The result is that some information gets to the web long after it gets into print.
Yes, you can beat print deadlines, but it requires EFFORT and readers generally don't like to use much of that.
So the result is that those of us who rely on the Internet for our news tend to get less of it later rather than the more of it earlier that we think we do.
[....]
If it's a big story that's important to a lot of people, the Internet either beats it to death or misses it completely. This is the nature of the beast and it makes me sad because I sit here on the third floor of an old house in Charleston, South Carolina banging out these columns and people ask me "Where do you GET this stuff?"
Not from the Internet.
I talk to people on the phone.
[....]
Which media promoted Chicago Economics, to the exclusion of all else, after all?
ReplyDeleteQuoting Brenda Rosser:
"How many decades have we been facing institutionalised deception and propaganda?
Economic misconceptions.
Innacurate historical anaylysis. Reductionist thinking.
Media filtering.
Incessant advertising.
PR spin.
Flak campaigns.
Words to hide the truth.
Friedman to promote 'expert dependence, 'individualism', 'centralisation'. To teach us to accept our artificial environment and leave us with values that exchange forests for packaging, nutrition for non-foods, joy for back-yard swimming pools..."
http://econospeak.blogspot.com/2007/09/how-to-do-chicago-economics.html
Well if it were not for the fact that just about every foreign news outlet has a web presence I might be worried. But the notion that you need to get your foreign news as filtered through a US 'Paper of Record' seems oddly quaint. I don't consult BBC News daily, nor do I make it a habit of checking in with the Guardian, the Independent or the Sydney Morning Herald. On the other hand I have all of them bookmarked and do take the occasional look. That is while it may have been convenient to use the WaPo as a crutch over the last couple of decades, modern technology overs us the change to toss that crutch and walk on our own through the fields of foreign news and reporting.
ReplyDeleteAs to blogging replacing newspapers well maybe not. On the other hand they do provide multiple opportunities for news aggregation, while none of us individually has time to review everything it is not hard to find a blog that systematically covers a particular sub-section of that everything. It is like having a sea of more or less hard working and more or less reliable research assistants, you give one or more a trial and if they don't work out you move on.
And of course we have examples like Talking Points Memo which is a nice combination of original reporting, news aggregation, and OP-ED functions (taking the whole span of TPM sites). Can TPM stand on its own? Well no. On the other hand almost all the national and international content in the three local papers here (one town and two metro) comes from AP anyway, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with having a system of news gatherers (AP, AFP etc) along side a system of news disseminators.
I like the experience of reading a physical newspaper and have bought one or more a day for more than thirty years, mostly to have something to read at lunchtime. But in recent years it is rare that I learn anything from the national/international pages that I haven't already picked up from the half dozen or not national papers I review electronically over breakfast. By the time I read it in the dead tree edition it almost always seems like old news.
Bruce,
ReplyDeleteWhat newspapers put up on their websites tends not to be every story but just a selecion. So, you may not catch things that you would reading an in-depth newspaper, and the ones "of record" tend to be more those, or used to be.
Furthermore, there is the issue of having as many sources as possible. You are really satisfied with having all your foreign news come from the AP, supplemented by some scattered readings of what foreign newspapers put up on their websites? Sure, you can get deeper coverage of specific issues by focusing on particular websites. But there are lots of things I would like to know about that are not on those particular websites and do not get reported on the pathetic US TV news (or even necessarily what BBC sends to the US).
Finally, regarding this business of foreign-based people supplying local reports, well, they have their limits, and if they are not backed up by some print media, they can run into the problem I had in breaking the story about the Harrisonburg Kurds. The broader blogosphere did not believe it until there was this print backup somewhere.
Barkley
I have probably posted 20 comments at DeLong saying that the best thing a deep-pockets liberal / rational human being could do would be to start an honest, intelligent, center-left national newspaper.
ReplyDeleteIt could be staffed by up-and-coming new journalists and by experienced semi-retired, disgruntled, and involuntarily-retired journalists.
The business plan would have to be inventive, given the current climate, and the funder would have to be willing to risk a few hundred million. (But not determined to do so -- this plan works best if it's profitable). It would have to get some voluntary support from readers willing to pay for quality. (Reliance on free and cheap media is one of the destroyers of our democracy).
For all the praise Knight-Ridder got for their Iraq coverage, they almost went bankrupt, and none of the deep-pockets liberals cared enough to rescure them. They could be the core of the new newspaper.
I have also suggested that the Guardian put out a US edition, but that's never happened.
All the money Soros poured into MoveOn etc. left little long-term residue, and Kerry lost anyway. People have to get away from every-two-years elections and build up a year-in year-out infrastructure.
"(Reliance on free and cheap media is one of the destroyers of our democracy). For all the praise Knight-Ridder got for their Iraq coverage, they almost went bankrupt, and none of the deep-pockets liberals cared enough to rescure them. They could be the core of the new newspaper..."
ReplyDeleteThe internet provides an avenue for news to be published that simply would have had no coverage whatsoever before. In Tasmania this new dynamic has led to the resignation of the Labor premier of the state just this week. My state newspaper is the Tasmanian Times (www.tasmaniantimes.com). The vast majority of authors publish there on a voluntary (unpaid) basis.
Yes, it does link to stories in the mainstream press on a regular basis. But, on the other hand, the mainstream press regularly draw upon the contributions of bloggers/voluntary authors for their insight and stories.
Given a choice I would never go back to merely relying on the for-profit press. I don't buy newsPAPERs. If an electronic version were available for profit-oriented news I certainly wouldn't be paying for it. Why would you spend money on a publication that is mostly advertisements and has such an incredibly bad performance record? A publication owned by big business interests with vast investments in native forest clearfells, fraudulent financing, the nuclear and war industries???
The essential question is: How can we reward good, honest reporting and journalism?? Subscribe to at least one high quality web-based news service that doesn't rely on advertising revenue. That seems logical.
Another alternative is to engage in voluntary authorship yourself.
There's no way volunteers can match the New York Times etc. for international coverage. And many big domestic stories require months of full-time work by several people, with a lot of travel and hours of long-distance phone bills.
ReplyDeletePerhaps the new media alternative will be online rather than hard copy, but you'll still need a lot of paid full-time reporters, and monetizing the internet has proven extremely difficult (if I'm not mistaken, Salon and Slate have never been profitable).
Blogs etc. are a valuable supplement and watchdog, but I don't see that they'll ever replace newspapers.
Seems to me that, overall, the NY Times does a poor job of reporting about international affairs. Sure everyone talks about what's in the Times and that makes it a must read.
ReplyDeleteBut should it be a must read? I guess we would have to systematically analyze a month's worth of that paper's output, from say two years ago, and see how much of it was exclusive reporting, i.e. not covered in the foreign press. We'd need to judge how much of that reporting was accurate and useful. And we'd need to look back and see if important stories were missed.
Does anyone out there have a sense of the scores the Times would earn if judged by such criteria?