One More Old Guy Eulogizes One More Print Newspaper
It’s not a good look to help create a problem and then complain about it.
But I’m going to do it anyway, because the Newark Star-Ledger is terminating its print edition as of February 2, and some infinitesimal part of the reason is that a couple of years ago I stopped buying it.
After several hundred thousand other people did the same, the owners threw up their hands and as of February 3 — the 66th anniversary of Buddy Holly’s death — will produce only a digital edition.
It’s a strategic marketing move that reflects the reality of contemporary media and aligns with a national trend toward digital in the newspaper game. That’s not the most troubling national trend we’re seeing here.
At a time when we have never had more sources for news, when it feels like every dancing dog, every police interaction and every offhand private remark is captured on someone’s phone and posted to the world, we are less reliably informed than we were before digital existed.
Too much information (TMI) turns out to be both a sitcom punchline and an actual problem. We are pelted with so much information and pseudo-information that it becomes white noise and we tune it out — a rational response that blocks important stuff as well as noise.
Where TMI intersects with the decline of print newspapers is here: Newspapers traditionally have been the great aggregator of, well, everything. Newspapers absorb all the noise and distill it down to what matters.
A good newspaper selects and prints world news, national news, state news, local news, news analysis, business news, sports news, entertainment news, celebrity gossip, obituaries, crossword puzzles and recipes. At one time, though less so now, it also gave you movie timetables, stock market prices, advice columns, fashion news, lifestyle trend news, humor columns and comics. On Sunday department store ads showcased new dresses and on Wednesdays you could see that the supermarket was having a sale on lamb chops.
Give the newspaper an hour, or 30 minutes, and you had a decent overview of the world.
When I started reading newspapers, the price for all this was a nickel, one of America’s all-time bargains. Six decades later, it still cost less than a dollar. Unfortunately, once the financial squeeze accelerated, newspapers began providing less and charging more. The reason I stopped buying the Star-Ledger, despite the fact it still has some top-level reporters and writers, is that it now costs $3 a copy — and with all the cutbacks, I wasn’t getting $3 worth of information.
I don’t mean to overromanticize or overglorify newspapers. They’re not perfect. They’re taking snapshots, not writing history, and they don’t get everything right. From more than four decades in newsrooms, I can attest that people who work at newspapers have often been the first and loudest to point that out.
Still, it’s a problem that we have few similar aggregators today. Clicking through a digital menu isn’t the same “experience” as leafing through physical pages, where you find the great story you didn’t even know you were looking for.
There are even-handed and valuable news aggregators on the Internet. They’re just hard to find in the digital forest and they rarely have the resources to do the same primary reporting as newspapers.
Where the Internet wins is convenience, since it’s just a couple of keystrokes or screen taps away. It’s easy to understand why tens of millions of people figure that what they can get on their phones for free is good enough and also easy to see why newspapers migrate there to chase down lost readers.
The problem for newspapers on the Internet is the oldest problem in capitalism: capital. Newspapers need to make money, or at least not lose a lot of it, and revenue from digital subscriptions and those annoying ads is pennies on the dollar compared to what print generated.
Less revenue means less investment, which means fewer journalists and ultimately less news.
The Star-Ledger, to cite my local example, used to cover virtually everything that happened in New Jersey government. If there was a hearing on a gasoline tax proposal or a shift in human services, the Ledger reported on it. Not all of those stories interested everyone. But they were available and they fulfilled the newspaper mission of shining a light.
Without that light, more public and corporate business is conducted in shadows. Even when nothing ominous transpires, that’s troubling.
Not by coincidence, in addition, do we live in a golden age for wackadoodle conspiracy theories. The Internet is a petri dish of elaborate rants about how unseen sinister forces are secretly controlling some part of our lives. They can be a lively read, an interesting diversion in an unsettling way. But almost all of them are nonsense and newspapers used to be the tacit antidote to their fun, pointing out that there’s invariably a logical if mundane explanation why X, Y or Z is happening. While you can still find X, Y or Z maddening, it rarely involves unseen sinister forces.
Taking it down to the neighborhood level, perhaps you’ve seen signs around town the last few weeks for election candidates and had no idea who they are. Perhaps you’ve seen a large new building and wondered what it will be. A decent local newspaper has those answers for you. It’s not life or death. It just helps connect a community. It’s good to know.
On a positive note, smart and concerned people are working to keep newspapers viable. Here in New Jersey, the Corporation for New Jersey Local Media aims to ease the financial problems of local newspapers by having them run as nonprofits. We also still have tens of thousands of journalists all over the country working hard and very often well to do what the best newspapers have always tried to do — deliver information that is as accurate as possible so the reader can be as informed as possible.
It’s true that 18-year-olds are about as likely to embrace print newspapers as they are to ditch quinoa for Spam. But since we live in a world that will always need sorting out, it would be valuable if we wouldn’t discard our most efficient aggregation tool without something to replace it.
