One of my longest-running subscriptions, 35+ years, is to the New York Review of Books. In the August 16th issue is an essay by long-time New York Times columnist Russell Baker with this title on the fate of newspapers in the wake of emerging media platforms and ownership influences by the likes of Rupert Murdoch. Baker writes:
... Journalism was being whittled away by a Wall Street theory that profits can be maximized by minimizing the product. Papers everywhere felt relentless demands for improved stock performance. The resulting policy of slash-and-burn cost-cutting has left the landscape littered with frail, failing, or gravely wounded newspapers which are increasingly useless to any reader who cares about what is happening in the world, the country, and the local community. Cost-cutting has reduced the number of correspondents stationed abroad, shriveled or closed news bureaus in Washington, and crippled local reporting staffs which once kept an eye on governors, mayors, state legislatures, small-town rascals, crooks, and jury suborners. It has also shrunk the size of the typical newspaper page, cutting the cost of newsprint by cutting news content. ...
And on blogging:
... Blogging is a more interesting development, perhaps because bloggers are so passionate about it. It is a valuable restraint on careless and sloppy journalism, for the vigilance of the bloggers misses not the slightest error or the least omission, and the fury of their rage is terrible to bear. Committed bloggers insist that they are practicing journalism just as surely as a correspondent like John Burns is practicing journalism when reporting on the Iraq war from Baghdad for The New York Times. Anyone wishing to debate the point must be ready to argue all night and well into next week. What is indisputable is that practically every blogger can now be a columnist. With vast armies of columnists blogging away, it seems inevitable that a few may eventually produce something original, arresting, and refreshing and so breathe new life into this worn-out journalistic form. ...
I think that the NYRB eventually put s articles behind DRM, but this one is currently up and readable for free. Link: New York Review of Books.
I was reminded to post this to this blog by a commentary on Baker's essay by Peter Osnos of The Century Foundation (The Platform: "Goodbye to Newspapers?). He writes:
... Of course, news delivered on paper is in trouble. The declines in advertising and circulation revenues are serious. The sale of Dow Jones to Rupert Murdoch has symbolic and business consequences and the loss of 1½ inches from the New York Times to save money on newsprint diminishes the size if not the stature of this pillar of journalism. All these are reflections of profound changes under way and not, it is widely assumed, for the better when it comes to the way we get news. The dismal statistics are combined with news peoples’ natural tendency—an essential component in the business—to favor bad news over good and to be skeptical of anyone at the helm. Nearly everyone in journalism reads Romenesko, the daily billboard of news about the news and in its comprehensive account of cuts and losses; the impression is unavoidable of inexorable decline. ¶ But that story line, I believe, is only part of the story. Everything you’ve read about the travails of the newspaper business is true. Yet as we head towards Labor Day, a traditional time of renewal in news and business cycles, it is worth noting what else is happening to the art and science of gathering and delivering news that represents a future that is probably unavoidable and not necessarily bad. The fundamental reality is that newsprint is being supplanted and supplemented by digital technologies. ...
Link: The Century Foundation. Thanks to Antoine van Agtmael for the link to the Osnos commentary. Antoine is chairman of Emerging Markets Management LLC and author of The Emerging Markets Century: How a New Breed of World-Class Companies Is Overtaking the World. --Dennis
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