It's funny how sometimes there's a confluence of your brain thinking about something, and then events in the real world prang you on the nose and you say, "Huh, I was just thinking about that!"
Yesterday, Gary Kamiya posted about all the neocons who, no matter how wrong they are, no matter how much they are rejected by American voters, still get a platform from which to opine their whacked-out ideas. And it got me thinking about newspapers and columnists in general.
What do people read newspapers for? I mean, seriously, think about it. Their ad revenue is dropping, so it's not the ads. They keep cutting comics. A lot of people are getting their sports and business news online. And now blogging is taking the place of op-eds and editorials.
That leave local news, and original reporting. I'm not going to address either one right now--I think the issue of original reporting, especially, is still evolving. And given the Iranian election situation, it would be, well, premature for me to opine about it. (I think a return to the "stringer" concept, with folks "filing" stories via blogs and twitter, might work. But honestly, I have no idea.)
On the op-ed side, though, what are we stuck with most of the time? Charles Krauthammer. Richard Cohen. David Broder. George Will. Cokie Roberts. Peggy Noonan. Maureen Dowd. Fred Hiatt. And all the other nationally-syndicated columnists that us political/news junkies are way, way, way too familiar with.
And now comes the news that one of the few interesting, left-wing, thoughtful, and thought-provoking columnists--Dan Froomkin--has gotten the heave-ho from The Washington Post. I was stunned. I love Dan Froomkin. On my bookmarks list, there's digby, Andrew Sullivan, TPM, and Dan Froomkin. (I most certainly do not read Drudge, which I consider absolute crap.) He was the only mainstream media blogger I read regularly. Now he's gone, and I quite literally have no reason at all to go to the Post's web site.
Listen up, Washington Post, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal: I am not interested in another snarky column by Maureen Dowd. I have no interest in Daniel Pipes, Robert Kagan, or Jonah Goldberg's latest attempt to justify their position on torture, the Iraq war, or why tax cuts are The Be All and End All. I most certainly do not want to read yet another reiteration of The Common Wisdom by "The Dean" of news columnists, the untouchable, unquestionable, Mr. David Broder.
So when newspapers are contemplating why they're collapsing, they should think about the firing of Dan Froomkin within months of hiring Bill "I'm never, ever right!" Kristol, and maybe they'll see that that's a reason right there. Your market is shrinking to the believers in the Beltway Conventional Wisdom, folks, and that's simply not enough to keep a broadsheet going. Get a clue. Or you'll be looking for a new line of work. Soon.
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O'Really?
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Comments
Yeah, it's depressing. NYT still has excellent in-depth articles, probably the best in the world. But its commentators are lacklustre, with a few exceptions.
The blogs and twenty four hour network news channels are cutting out their readership, sure. But more than that--much more--print ads just don't go for what they used to. Any paper that is at all reliant on classifieds (read: nearly all) are in trouble because of Craigslist and similar sites.
Editorials are nice sometimes, whether they're novel or not. But editorials aren't going anywhere. Now there are gazillions of them. This is one. The problem with newspapers going away or having less money is the point you don't want to go into: original news stories. Investigative journalism. That stuff is really expensive, and fewer and fewer papers can afford to do it and do it less and less. That's the scary thing.
The Christian Science Monitor is, for my money, the best paper in the country, precisely because of their incredible original and investigative reporting. They don't print paper now. The only other national daily left is USA Today, which, of course, is crap.
In short, don't worry about editorials. They'll always be around. But let's fear a little bit for a world where there's no one who can be counted on to do real reporting.
So why is readership dropping? The content is, more and more, stuff no one reads. One of those reasons for me: the op-eds are pointless, and better done as blogs.
Not refuting your point at all. Just saying that there's a bunch of reasons for readership drop.
Readership is certainly down. And your reasons are right, although I'd still contend that editorials haven't really changed. You always knew where Royko, Ivins, Etc. stood as well. They were still lynch-pins for their publications.
All the same, your point is valid. Sorry for coming off as hostile. As I said, I don't have any vested interest in newspapers surviving just because they're newspapers. I like them and all, and I'd be sorry to see them go, but if you can't keep up with the flow, etc., etc.
What disturbs me is what goes with newspapers. Comics will stay around. Sports coverage is going nowhere. Crafts and real estate and business are all fine. Even arts coverage and reviews have a place in a post-paper world.
But investigative journalism, the actual important thing that papers do... how will it survive? Television either doesn't do it or does it yellow, good luck finding any on radio outside of NPR (which ain't doing to great itself fiscally), the internet doesn't have the money to dish for it, nor any incentive to, as internet readers only want (their own) opinion.
The huge examples are obvious: where do you get unembedded war reporting without print journalism? Where do you get real, comprehensive whistle-blowing? That stuff is obvious. But so much bigger than that, where do you get tables? Where do you get the pure numbers and small civic matters about government and private agencies that make it hard to dig?
A little piece about city spending in Seattle can cost months and months of effort and thousands of dollars. No one will do that outside the print press.
In short, unless there's some model up and coming nobody has seen yet, with the death of newspapers goes the death of reliable information in most of its forms.
Whether papers survive or not, we've got another huge information problem up-and-coming in my view. Technology-induced myopia.
The nice thing about people getting their information from newspapers has always been that even if a paper skews liberal (New York Times, Washington Post) or conservative (Washington Times, Chicago Tribune) they weren't exclusively so.
More and more people are able to get tons more reading than ever, yet able to control that they only hear what they want to hear about and how they want to hear it. That to me is extremely perturbing. Yet I see no way of retarding, let alone halting the trend. It'll breed partisanship, breed extremism, breed isolationism, myopia, all kinds of neat sounding pejorative terms.
For a while, the problem of the internet seemed like it would be the lack of bottlenecks. It seems, instead, the problem is too many.