Another Nail in the Coffin of Newspapers
Posted on April 10th, 2009 in Blogs, Media, New Media |
Via Yglesias, the columnist Rosa Brooks announces her departure from the LA Times and makes a solid case for public financing of journalism. It’s worth reading.
Increasingly, it looks like newspapers are on the way out unless they make some dramatic changes. Yglesias is skeptical that public funding is necessary to save newspapers, but I’m more sympathetic to Brooks’ view. The future of journalism is hard to predict, but I see the newspaper business fading fast. Either newspapers will become nonprofit organizations, or they will disappear.
Some fans of new media may think that it’s not a problem if newspapers disappear because blogs will replace them. But as much as I love blogs, I have my doubts about the idea of bloggers and freelancers replacing the service that professional journalists have provided for the public. For instance, if you look at some of the most popular political blogs today, very few are doing investigative reporting because it’s so expensive. As Yglesias points out in a very interesting post about Twitter, online media just doesn’t have the power to generate much revenue.
It’s true that Talking Points Memo’s Muckraker has been able to pull off investigative reporting, but it’s not a very large operation, and its audience is necessarily limited to the internetigentsia. This is not to say that TPM’s influence is limited, as Josh Marshall and his team proved during the U.S. Attorney scandal. By the way, that was a wonderful smack-down of certain condescending fools in the traditional media who like to make fun of bloggers. The point is, unless TPM and other blogs like it invent a breakthrough method of generating much more revenue, their capacity for the kind of reporting that journalists have traditionally done is going to remain very small.
I see blogs playing an important role in the future of journalism, and that role will be defined in the near future. But replacing newspapers? No. In the immortal words of Charles Barkley, I may be wrong, but I doubt it.
5 Responses
Greetings:
Again, I should charge for this…you just don’t get it.
“…solid case for public financing of journalism.”
There is no solid case for public financing of journalism UNLESS you want to force propaganda down people’s throats.
Too many liberals are too afraid of the people getting their hands into things. The media is one of them.
The Boston Globe Democrat isn’t going under because of blogs…it is going under because it editorializes on the front page, refuses to print stories and prints half truths and partial regurgitations of facts. Too many people here know that when you open the Boston Glob you are getting half the story on a good day.
True capitalizism is more than capable of putting good news sources out there, but you gotta trust it. Trust the power of people spending their money they way they want to spend it.
People aren’t two year olds that need help spending the nickel gran’pa gave ‘em.
Liberals: UNDERSTAND…it’s not the governments money. It’s not the public’s money…it is the personal, private property of the person who EARNED it.
So if newspapers disappear, that’s just OK? I mean, what if no profitable model exists for investigative and international reporting any longer?
As a longtime reader and subscriber to the Washington Post, I am troubled by its ongoing problems. It’s been downsizing so fast recently, I don’t know whether it will last too much longer, though it is difficult to conceive of the Nation’s Capital being without a newspaper. Bloggers are fine, but so far are very limited in the amount of investigative reporting they can do. Newspapers have always had their biases and their political orientations, but most of them always provided some good basic reporting of facts and issues. Public funding of newspapers seems doubtful to me, so right now the future looks cloudy.
I think that public funding from the government is unlikely. Maybe transforming newspapers into 501(3)(c) entities is the best option. I hope I’m wrong that newspapers will not be able to survive as a for-profit industry. But I seriously doubt that they will be able to start charging for online content. I wouldn’t pay to read Krugman, for instance. I’d just stick to reading the economics blogs. And if a news and political junkie like me wouldn’t pay, then almost no one would.
Another thought: if papers charged money to read online, I wouldn’t pay for the investigative reporting either. I’d know that bloggers would just pick up on this reporting and disseminate it. There really would be no point to having a paid subscription to an online news site.