Last night, journalists at The Seattle Times put their paper to bed for the last time. The San Francisco Chronicle has recently made severe cuts to its staff in order to be able to consider possible mergers with producers of other local newspapers in order to save itself if no other opportunities for salvation come up. Both The Seattle Times and The San Francisco Chronicle are papers that have a history dating back to the days of The Civil War and even before. Papers with similar legacies across America and the world are facing the very same dilemma.
With many newsrooms downsizing and some papers calling it quits all together, the days of the “two newspaper town” are conceivably coming to an end. It is doubtful that the quality or quantity of news available will diminish; in fact, the technology that is replacing the conventional newspaper is drastically increasing the amount of information available.
Citing a recent Pew Research Center report, The New York Times reported that “the internet overtook print newspapers as a [primary] news source this year” in its January 4, 2009 edition. Respondents to the Pew Research Center’s poll were given three choices pertaining to where they received the majority of their news from: the internet, newspapers, or ‘other’, and were allowed to specify more than one source. The report found that roughly 40 percent of Americans get their national and international news from an online source, while roughly 35 percent get it from newspapers.
This, however, is not a death knell for newspapers. It is now up to papers to find equilibrium between putting out a daily printed edition and managing online content if print editions are to remain. Most papers are making the transition online almost wholly, as is the current case with The Seattle Times. There is still value in a daily newspaper. Having the information contained within a concise package of sorts and catered to a particular locale can be amazingly convenient.
A newspaper can more easily be scoured over during a meal, on a bus, or at any given time when being “plugged in” isn’t ideal. People like newspapers. A newspaper can be folded and stuffed into a pocket, reused to catch paint from getting on the carpet or to wash glass without leaving streaks, it can be used as an umbrella or even insulation for fine china during a move. Not even the newest model laptops are that convenient.
A newspaper’s editorial section is a perfect example. Generally, when people are perusing the internet bookmarking pages they’d return to or subscribing to podcasts they would listen to, it is very often material they agree with. That is to say, a person generally won’t be bookmarking the page of an editorialist that enrages them with their opinions week after week. A newspaper will include opinions from across the spectrum, allowing people to take in a much fuller scope of opinion on a subject.
Not everyone is able to make the jump to an all-online news service, and an under-informed public is dangerous, especially when living in a democracy. It is the public that ultimately levies the decisions; in a democracy, the ultimate power is the vote, and an under-informed public’s vote is of considerably less value. The news media is the first the primary source of information for the public at large. It is the news media that keeps the attentive public informed on current issues, allowing them to make better decisions because they have background information on an issue.
If a ballot measure reads “increase sales tax by .50%”, the first reaction is that this would cost the individual, the voter, more money on the whole, so they will not vote for the measure. However, and informed voter may understand that their locale needs this extra funding to rise out of a deficit, or to fund projects badly needed, and therefore the measure may actually have a better chance at passing because the voter’s charge is then to make a decision on weather that .50% sales tax increase is in their best interest given where the money is going.
While a voter pamphlet will help flush this information out (though it can be a complicated read), it is the news media that helps break it down to a cost/benefit analysis based on the individual versus the interest of the locale at large. The dialogue that takes place within the news media is the primary source for information in voters’ decision making.
The advent of the internet which has led to the wide proliferation of the blogosphere, including audio blogs that appear in the form of a podcast, has so widened the social dialogue to include such a wide number and variety of opinions that the volume is often deafening. The reporting and editorializing of current events is no longer limited to press-affiliated reporters and columnists but is now open to anyone with something to share.
Broadcast media producers and bloggers all get their information from one original source: newspaper writers. With most all information that goes into these mediums coming from these writers (weather they are writing for an actual print paper or an online edition), so if such severe cuts occur in newspapers, what will happen to these sources of information?
Bloggers also teeter on the edge of ethical journalism, often allowing considerably more opinion than fact through, so if there are no more print sources to serve as an anchor to fact then will news media eventually be reduced to a wiki? The age-old adage of ‘consider your source’ is becoming more difficult to maintain as primary sources on the internet are being drowned out.
Enjoying such unmitigated access to information gives people an unprecedented freedom. It is now that one can open a web browser and access news from nearly any region in the world, post an opinion piece on a publicly hosted site, or provide comments (in effect, editorialize) on another’s opinion. The detriment of such unmitigated access to information lies in discerning what is correct, and what is relevant.
