newspapers
iStock

In the News

The News is Breaking Our Hearts

Posted February 27, 2009

When Whiner-in-Chief was 20 years old, she landed a short internship at a trendy New York City newspaper. What a coup! At least, it would have been, if only, when she arrived at the office of Trendy Newspaper, someone or other had remembered who she was, why she was coming, and what she was supposed to do. Sad to say, she spent that internship reading copies of old newspapers, trying to look as though she was “on assignment.”

When W-i-C was 21 years old, she graduated from college and tried to get a job on a newspaper. Any newspaper. She sent her resume, cover letter attached, to every single newspaper in every single state of the U.S. asking if they would consider her for a job. Without exception, they all said no.

Fortunately, we’re not the type to hold a grudge. W-i-C loves newspapers. They may have rejected W-i-C, in fact, they certainly did reject W-i-C, but she’s never found a paper she doesn’t love (at least a little). Newspapers are an essential part of a civil society. Worst President in the History of the Galaxy doesn’t like to read them. What better proof of just how important they really are?

It was one of the most thrilling moments of fifth grade when Whiner-in-Chief first learned how to fold the pages exactly the right way while reading a paper. We still fold the paper that way, although now we’re usually drinking a cup of coffee or a glass of a bargain red while making our way through our daily stack. Whiner-in-Chief throws herself into every single part of the paper — except the sports pages and the crossword puzzle. If we’ve got enough time to spare, we’ll throw ourselves there too.

It hurts us when newspapers die.

In the past, we’ve asked “Are Journalists an Endangered Species?” Today, we want to know: Why bail out General Motors, which burned its way through $30 billion-plus last year, without considering some type of assistance for noble papers like the Rocky Mountain News, which will close after today, just two months short of its 150th anniversary? Why not throw a life jacket or two to the New Haven (Connecticut) Register, the Philadelphia Inquirer, or any of the 33 U.S. daily newspapers whose parent companies have recently filed for bankruptcy?

We understand the dynamics here: Ad sales are down and more and more people are relying on the internet instead of traditional media. But newspapers matter too much to let them go down without a fight. Why not spend some small portion of our taxpayer dollars helping traditional media reinvent itself, along with all those broken banks and the Big Three. Doesn’t this deserve to be on the table?

The Whiner wants to know: How do you feel about newspapers? What do (or don’t) you read? Can newspapers survive and, if so, how?

Reader Comments

  1. abo gato

    I’ve always loved newspapers, but then, I am a compulsive reader. I have subscribed to the local papers, three then down to one paper, all my life…it came from my parents who were subscribers. I love to read papers in cities when we travel. We also subscribe to the NYT home delivery.

    Sad news in our town yesterday….our local paper has laid off about 150 or so people, 70+ of them in the newsroom. I hate to see this happen all over the country.

    We should be thinking bailout for newspapers too. I’d rather see them get money than places like Citi-Bank with huge bonuses for the fatcats.

  2. Spokane Al

    I fail to understand what throwing money at newspapers who are loosing readers and advertising will do, other than postponing the inevitable while costing taxpayers money. This decline, in my opinion, is not anything new, and one that has been seen as coming for some time. Traditional media should be, or should have been in the process of reinventing itself, if possible, for some time now.

    I am troubled by the thought that bailout money provided to banks justifies bailouts for numbers of other entities and industries. That implies traveling down a road that I do not agree with. If we disagree with bank bailouts let’s discuss that rather than using it as a platform for more bailouts.

    This comes from an avid newspaper reader.

    P.S. I am not in the pro auto industry bailout camp either.

  3. Hope

    Having grown up in a tiny town with only a weekly rag (which I still subscribe to via USPS just for the local gossip), I was addicted to newspapers early. And I’ve subscribed to the daily in every city and town I’ve lived in just to get the local flavor.

    I do read news on the internet, but like books, I love to hold a newspaper in my hands and savor it. And for some reason, print material is easier on my eyes that a computer screen.

    Our local paper is struggling, too. After the holidays, they cut back and combined sections to the point that readers protested loudly, and they recanted. It’s still thin. I love several of our local columnists, I like to peruse the weddings and engagements, and I never miss the obits, a habit picked up in my small hometown, where every obit was someone I knew.

    I was sad to hear that the SF Chronicle is also in trouble…I loved that paper when I lived there. Wah….

  4. Hope

    Spokane Al…we don’t always agree, but here I am (sadly) with you. We can’t continue to throw taxpayer dollars at every industry in trouble. As much as it pains me, we have to let the market economy adjust itself to some degree.

    IMO, there are industries that are so huge the ensuing fallout will affect all of us, but where is the bottom of the national pocketbook? I don’t have answers. But we’re clearly not in Kansas anymore, Toto.

  5. Nano

    I have to agree with Spokane Al, on this one.

  6. Nate

    What if newspapers could get some sort of tax break or incentive to focus on revamping their Web sites in order to remain current and cutting edge?

  7. Aby Warburg

    When newspapers like the Chronicle and the New York times put all of their content online for free, they shoot themselves in the foot. No more bailouts, they’res no way they’d work anyway. If one really cares about having a variety of news sources, one should support net neutrality, as well as the reinstatement of the fairness doctorine for tv,radio & print.
    As for the Chronicle, it’s been mostly wire service filler for years, and when the New York times consitently features such fluff as “Great off-season Getaways in the Hamptons, rooms only 225″ a night they’ve more than lost my demographic.

  8. Andrew

    I don’t think traditional newspapers can survive in the Internet age. Online we have customizeable news feeds, intelligent commentators, Craigslist, blogs and forums about everything under the sun, multimedia content, foreign reporters, you name it. But just like music and movies, we now expect high-quality journalism for free. It’s true that overhead is much lower for online journalism, but in the long term, if only the rich pay for news, the news will only be for the rich. I don’t know what will happen.

    My local paper has been running pseudo-news for years–75% fluff, 20% misleading, 5% legitimate journalism. I finally canceled it in disgust in 2003 after months of “everyone knows Saddam has WMD”. For local news, I listen to the radio, and for everything else there is the Internet.

  9. old teacher

    Haven’t parent companies sacked the resources of the papers they’ve been buying and put those funds elsewhere? Not sure I want to help these parent companies at all. I enjoy reading the paper, but I’m reading the Whiner and other online feeds more.

  10. Laura

    I’m a compulsive reader, too… but I’ve never been much of a newspaper reader, ever. Sometimes I might pick up someone else’s if I was desperate for a read, but I don’t think I’ve ever bought one for myself in my entire life (I’m 31). There’s too much in your typical newspaper that doesn’t interest me, and even before environmentalism was in vogue, it always felt wasteful to me to wade through all that paper to get to the 10% or so that I found useful. In the pre-internet days I got most of my news from the radio. Now that it’s all online I probably consume more news than ever, more compulsively than ever. I don’t mind the online ads so much because they’re easier to skip past than the full-page Tiffany’s ad in the newspaper that you have to actively flip past, and it rubs off on your fingers, to boot. Journalists shouldn’t take it personally – I love journalism and even considered it as a field myself. I just think we’re wasting a whole lot of time (and trees) with all this printing. Newspapers MUST figure out a way to make their online services profitable so the “paper” part stops sinking them.

  11. CMP

    I am heartbroken about the demise of newspapers, but I don’t want the government involved in their funding in any way whatsoever.

    It’s been my impression that very little revenue comes from subscriptions, and that the majority of income for newspapers is ad revenue. It does seem like that would translate well to the online world–which is where I think all papers will end up.

    As much as I love a newspaper, I have to say that I really like being able to go online to check the headlines in as many papers and news sources as I wish. And I feel better about my carbon footprint too (don’t I?).

  12. Richard Melville Ballerand

    The American newspapers I read or listen to are the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

    I am not in a position to comment on other papers in the US.

    However, I generally make far more use of new media than newspapers.

  13. amy

    We took three daily papers when I was a kid, and I was required to read at least one. (I picked WSJ, because of the front-page center column.) The afternoon paper closed when I was still in elementary school, and that newspaper tardy bell, USA Today, started publication when I was a teen.

    I wrote for my college paper — edited eventually — and wrote for a Times-Mirror paper, by which time the city room noise was gone and the bosses were desperate to keep interest by turning over bigger & bigger sections to “Stories About You!” It was a flop. Circulation was dropping like a rock, papers were merging, and yes, there was a recession on, but it was no secret that newspapers were already for old people.

    Ten years ago — before W’s day — a sportswriter friend from my old paper came out to my new town, to cover a college game. By that time I was in IT, and inadvertantly I terrified him by regaling him with a two-beer sci-fi fantasy about how our paper and the others would be gone, gone, gone, and it’d all be every writer for himself online, no salaries, no security, mass whims turning on a dime, perfect journalistic competition.

    Alas, it’s all come true. Would that the public had better taste and a longer attention span. The biggest problem for me isn’t the lack of serious news/opinion outlets — those still exist, and will continue as long as there are loons who are willing to be poor — but the lack of a ready way in which to educate a kid in civic, national, international affairs. I go out of my way now to buy newspapers because I want to be able to talk with the kid about them at the table. You can’t do that with a computer. A screen is for one person. Yes, she loves the Times’s video content, but it’s not a comfortable setup for both of us to watch while eating breakfast.

    I love it, too, that nothing on the paper moves. When we read the paper — because she can’t really read yet — she says, “What does it say? What does it say?” And she wants to read. On the screen, there’s too much video, she doesn’t care.

    And, of course, the papers are good for fingerpainting and papier-mache after.

  14. amy

    Oh — I should say, I have more & more trouble reading the Times, WSJ, that ilk, because I know too much about the people who write the stories now. Too many of them are Ivy/j-school products and after a while the tone and social presumptions are unbearable. The Gen-Y whine gets my back up, and the eternal adolescence of many of the NY writers is an annoyance. Upshot’s that I don’t read the NYT Sunday magazine anymore, seldom buy the Sunday paper.

    Come to think of it, there’s a city quality I miss in the Times now. Yes, there’s an activist sense there that pushes the fact of poverty in your face. But it’s a rich kid’s move. Look, there’s poverty, I just discovered it, isn’t it awful, and You, Reader, are complicit if you don’t read! I used to get the sense that rich and poor were jumbled together in the paper because that was the city, that was the world. I don’t know — maybe it was always a rich-kid thing in the Times. But I didn’t used to feel it that way.

  15. amy

    Oh, re govt funding:

    Good luck giving newspapers away. We’ve got kiosks on campus here where the kids can get the papers free. Still have stacks of the Times and other big papers at 4 pm. They don’t want it.

    And no, don’t be silly, you don’t want journalists dependent on Congress for money. Bad enough when they thought they mightn’t get dinner invitations.

  16. amy

    CMP, you feel better about your carbon footprint by contributing to the use of 500W/sqft data centers?

  17. Suz

    I don’t want taxpayers bailing out newspapers, either. The crisis is: without functioning news bureaus, all we’ll have online or in print are blogs. Digest sites like Huffington Post are fine, but most of the content is either linked to major metro dailies, TV and/or cable outlets, or opinion pieces.

    Why the NYT and WaPo and even Time, Newsweek, etc., thought online content must be free and therefore cannibalized their print versions, I can’t comprehend. The WSJ and USA Today have always required electronic subscription. For newspapers and newsmagazines to survive, they *must* charge a day-, week- or month-rate for content. They’ll lose some readers, sure, even if the cost is minimal. But like the old saying goes, why buy the cow, if the milk is free? Newspaper management obviously forgot that truism.

  18. CMP

    Amy, I don’t know if I feel better about my carbon footprint or not, hence my question mark. I have no idea whether cutting down trees for newspapers –and all the various transportation, machine operation, ink production, involved in getting my newspaper to my doorstep– is worse, carbon-wise, than relying on servers. Would seem like the online version would be better, cleaner but I don’t really know. I take it you are saying newspaper production and delivery has a smaller footprint than a server?

  19. amy

    CMP, I don’t know. I do know that the proliferation of PCs, mobile devices, and offsite data storage has goosed our consumption considerably, and that energy consumption at data centers is so large a cost that it determines where they’re built. And the energy use is growing much faster than the industry analysts had expected. I haven’t seen numbers for computing-related energy costs over, say, the last ten years, but until I do, I’d be reluctant to characterize computing as green.

  20. Coastman

    I think that many folks view newspapers with a bit of nostalgia, based on family experiences or the like. However, if we really take a critical look at it, it is still “garbage in, garbage out”. By that I mean that you still have to (or should) read a paper with critical thought. Just because it is printed in a paper does not make it more accurate than a website or a blog.

    Additionally, papers have made their money in one area: advertising. I cannot tell you the last time I looked at a paper for advertising in order to make a purchase. All of my consumer research is done online.

    I think that papers are a thing of the past.

  21. Nicholas Bodley

    Once nearly all nems papers are dead, who will investigate local corruption and other misbehavior? Surely not NPR or PRI!

    There’s a weekly that I might subscribe to: The Epoch Times.
    It’s fiercely (but not at all blatantly) anti-Chinese Communist Party (and its Nine Commentaries offer ample reason). The rest looks and reads like very good reporting, and that’s what I’d subscribe for.

    It’s free in curbside boxes, but I’m retired and don’t go near boxes routinely. It’s probably supported quietly by interested/concerned people and organizations.