Archive for February, 2008
Two Takes on the Future of Newspapers
February 1, 2008 1:52 pmThere’s no question that the business of newspapers (while never easy) has become particularly difficult in the last decade. The questions come over the reasons for the difficulty and the best response to the troubles in the industry. This week we’ve seen two different responses — one that I think could be helpful as we try to move forward, and one that pretty well encapsulates the attitudes that are leading us deeper into troubled times.
Jon Talton has written a serious and meaningful indictment of newspaper management in the current era. I saw many of the same problems he discusses, though mine were seen at magazines rather than newspapers. In too many cases, tech-phobic managers tried to block the technological forces of change rather than use them to deliver great content to the readers. Even more damning, too many publishers used a decline in readership as an excuse to abandon the existing reader base, rather than trying to build on reader loyalty to find new ways to grow.
The kind of inward-looking, defensive attitudes that Talton rails against are on display in Roy Peter Clark’s Poynter column on why the readers are wrong. I have listened to fellow journalists run through the arguments that Clark makes, and every one rings hollow, blaming our readers for not properly understanding our purity and greatness when we are the ones who claim to be professional communicators. If the public in large numbers say that they see bias in our coverage, then the proper response isn’t to claim that the majority of the population is unable to properly read for meaning, but to apply the same sort of rigorous scrutiny to our pages that we claim to apply to government, business, sports, and the other societal structures that we cover.
I firmly believe that the public isn’t falling away from newspapers because they no longer read, but because we’re no longer giving them stories that they want and need to read. Our readers aren’t fixated on celebrity twaddle because they’re shallow, but because we as an industry have offered them little else. Let’s stop pretending that our highest calling as journalists involves looking back at a "Golden Era" of limited competition for reader attention. Society needs the stories we’re able to tell, and deserves a press that looks at itself as honestly as we claim to look at them.
