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Oct
16
I apologize in advance, especially to some new MSM friends, but also to the very talented PD people I know personally as well, but the title of this Poynter Online piece was just too good to pass up.
Here’s what Roy Peter Clark thinks:
In my opinion, the newspapers I most often read not only do not suck, but are better than they have ever been: I’m thinking Atlanta, St. Pete, New Orleans, Portland (Oregon), Newark, Seattle, Fort Lauderdale, Raleigh, just to name a few. Others, of course, have suffered from the loss of talented personnel and news capacity, so they may be becoming suckier. And then there are those places where the papers really do suck, where, in the words of the great Gene Roberts, you can throw the paper up in the air and read it before it hits the ground.
A lot of journalists and former journalists and bloggers seem to hate their newspapers because of some vague psychic or moral sensibility, as if some great social contract has been breached. The newspaper was supposed to represent some Rockwellian expression of American idealism and democratic life along with a devotion to craft. Instead, it became a place where the sounds of cash registers were louder than the roar of the presses; where any spark of creativity was watered with a fire hose; where literary rebels were chained by the next corporate formula to come down the pike.
I could put out the best newspaper that ever existed, using a corps of journalists who have recently left the business. But would anybody buy it? And who would pay the costs for great journalism in the public interest?
[Can you think of ways for newspapers not to suck? What difference would it make to their ultimate fate?]
Check out the debate in the comments of that post here and add to it if you feel like it. Or comment here: Can newspapers not suck? If so, how? If not, why not?
By Jill Miller Zimon at 4:22 pm October 16th, 2007 in Media
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5 Responses to ““Can Newspapers Not Suck?””
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The Founding Fathers gave us the freedom of the press, and my assumption is that they saw this freedom as an important component of liberty – the Fourth Estate that is not afraid to take on the government on behalf of the citizens.
But what happens if the local press doesn’t want to fill that role?
At the end of the day, a newspaper is a business that must sell ads and papers to survive. When the publisher comes to the conclusion that the profitability of the paper is optimized by NOT taking on the government because the people don’t seem to care, then where are we?
We have one newspaper in Columbus, and it’s owned by a powerful family who also controls one of the TV stations and several radio stations. They have no interest in provoking the public, only entertaining.
This is why I think responsible, trusted blogs may be the next generation of the free press in America. I think we can still trust the national news organizations to cover national and international matters reasonably well.
But at the local level, I think a cadre of truly independent information sources are developing. Not every story is being covered, but they are, I believe, starting to fill the Fourth Estate role essential in a democracy.
But it won’t mean anything until a couple of other hurdles are conquered. One is distribution, or more specifically, discovery. How does one go about finding the blog writers in their community who are monitoring the government? It’s not easy for me, and I’ve been immersed in the online world for 20 years.
The other is apathy. I wonder how often a Thomas Payne pamphlet got tossed in the trash because the recipient just didn’t care. I’m sure there are folks here in Columbus just writing their hearts out about local matters. The only one I’ve found that’s worth paying attention to is Bonobo, but he focused on his ‘burb, as I am on mine.
Neither he nor I have the resources to observe, research and write about things of a larger scope. That’s where the blogger gap is I think – a lack of coverage between the very local, and the national level.
Newspapers and local TV stations could fill that gap. But the truth is that their readers/viewers don’t care enough to demand it.
We toured the Hearst Castle in San Simeon a couple of weeks ago when I was out there on my motorcycle. You look at the enormous wealth W.R. Hearst developed publishing sensationalist drivel and realize that a truly great newspaper is a very rare thing in America. The NYT is the only one that makes my list.
Paul is right.
I don’t even have to read the article to comment because its so clear. And I’ve worked on five (count ‘em) daily newspapers including the late, great (in my opinion) Cleveland Press and the bottom line is that if the bottom line is money or reflecting the world view of the owner, the paper WILL suck. For a paper not to suck it has to do one very, very basic thing – bite the hands that feed it to tell the truth- whether its local businesses, the government, car dealers, politicians, whomever. Yes, I read the PD. I don’t like it, I find its op-ed section about as vanilla as one could find. But its the only game in town and I’m a newsie and its force of habit. Its better than nothing. Well, its better than the News-Herald and saying that breaks my heart because that was the first newspaper I worked for. And it kicked ass back then (1980-81). Now? Sigh.
Ben Bradlee, speaking in a forum on the media, said that he believed a family-owned newspaper was far more likely to offer good journalism than a corporate newspaper. He said he couldn’t imagine WaPo uncovering Watergate if the buck didn’t stop with Katharine Graham.
(But apparently it doesn’t always work out this way, according to Paul’s comment above).
The case here is that the family that owns the newspaper is conflicted in that it is also heavily involved in other business ventures. I’ve just finished reading “Getting Around Brown” by Gregory Jacobs, which is about the resegregation of public schools in central Ohio. Jacobs observes that the Wolfe family is really an insider and powerful influencer in regard to central Ohio politics, not an independent observer. Their first mission is to preserve a positive climate for commerce, which means not doing things which create conflict and controversy such that the local economy is affected.
To fulfill the purpose of a free press, the press needs to be eager to stand up first to take on the most powerful political elements of our country. But the community needs to care enough to join the battle (and buy newspapers). Sadly, few citizens care enough to do so, so even the publishers who would like to take on ‘the establishment’ feel no reason to put their livelihood at risk.
PL
Great comments. Does anyone else see this as a classic struggle between pursuit of a passion versus pursuit of profit, running parallel and not ever meeting?