Chris Hedges: Bad Days for Newsrooms—and Democracy

[marmar]

from Truthdig:



Bad Days for Newsrooms—and Democracy

Posted on Jul 21, 2008

By Chris Hedges

The decline of newspapers is not about the replacement of the antiquated technology of news print with the lightning speed of the Internet. It does not signal an inevitable and salutary change. It is not a form of progress. The decline of newspapers is about the rise of the corporate state, the loss of civic and public responsibility on the part of much of our entrepreneurial class and the intellectual poverty of our post-literate world, a world where information is conveyed primarily through rapidly moving images rather than print.

All these forces have combined to strangle newspapers. And the blood on the floor, this year alone, is disheartening. Some 6,000 journalists nationwide have lost their jobs, news pages are being radically cut back and newspaper stocks have tumbled. Advertising revenues are dramatically falling off with many papers seeing double-digit drops. McClatchy Co., publisher of the Miami Herald, has seen its shares fall by 77 percent this year. Lee Enterprises Inc., which owns the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, is down 84 percent. Gannett Co., which publishes USA Today, is trading at nearly a 17-year low. The San Francisco Chronicle is now losing $1 million a week.

The Internet will not save newspapers. Although all major newspapers, and most smaller ones, have Web sites, and have had for a while, newspaper Web sites make up less than 10 percent of newspaper ad revenue. Analysts say that although Net advertising amounts to $21 billion a year, that amount is actually relatively small. So far, the really big advertisers have stayed away, either unsure of how to use the Internet or suspicious that it can’t match the viewer attention of older media.

Newspapers, when well run, are a public trust. They provide, at their best, the means for citizens to examine themselves, to ferret out lies and the abuse of power by elected officials and corrupt businesses, to give a voice to those who would, without the press, have no voice, and to follow, in ways a private citizen cannot, the daily workings of local, state and federal government. Newspapers hire people to write about city hall, the state capital, political campaigns, sports, music, art and theater. They keep citizens engaged with their cultural, civic and political life. When I began as a foreign correspondent 25 years ago, most major city papers had bureaus in Latin America, the Middle East, Europe, Asia and Moscow. Reporters and photographers showed Americans how the world beyond our borders looked, thought and believed. Most of this is vanishing or has vanished.

We live under the happy illusion that we can transfer news-gathering to the Internet. News-gathering will continue to exist, as it does on this Web site and sites such as ProPublica and Slate, but these traditions now have to contend with a new, widespread and ideologically driven partisanship that dominates the dissemination of views and information, from Fox News to blogger screeds. The majority of bloggers and Internet addicts, like the endless rows of talking heads on television, do not report. They are largely parasites who cling to traditional news outlets. They can produce stinging and insightful commentary, which has happily seen the monopoly on opinion pieces by large papers shattered, but they rarely pick up the phone, much less go out and find a story. Nearly all reporting—I would guess at least 80 percent—is done by newspapers and the wire services. Take that away and we have a huge black hole. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080721_so_goes_the_newsroom_the_empire_and_the_world/

[ixion]

1. so let's make lemonade from lemons and fill that hole with

rejuvenated investigative journalists who are independent of the corporate noise machine.

[Demeter]

7. Otherwise Known as Bloggers

From the nets of the Nets, filtering out the plankton like so much baleen, comes food for thought and facts for action.

Newsprint has been reduced to the Shopper's Gazette and Propaganda Emporeum.

[stillcool]

2. Thanks..good article

"We are cleverly entertained during our descent"

The rise of our corporate state has done the most, however, to decimate traditional news-gathering. Time Warner, Disney, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., General Electric and Viacom control nearly everything we read, watch, hear and ultimately think. And news that does not make a profit, as well as divert viewers from civic participation and challenging the status quo, is not worth pursuing. This is why the networks have shut down their foreign bureaus. This is why cable newscasts, with their chatty anchors, all look and sound like the “Today” show. This is why the FCC, in an example of how far our standards have fallen, defines shows like Fox’s celebrity gossip program “TMZ" and the Christian Broadcast Network’s “700 Club” as “bona fide newscasts.” This is why television news personalities, people like Katie Couric, have become celebrities earning, in her case, $15 million a year. This is why newspapers like the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune are being ruthlessly cannibalized by corporate trolls like Sam Zell, turned into empty husks that focus increasingly on boutique journalism. Corporations are not in the business of news. They hate news, real news. Real news is not convenient to their rape of the nation. Real news makes people ask questions. They prefer to close the prying eyes of reporters. They prefer to transform news into another form of mindless amusement and entertainment.

[Igel]

6. The market's fractured.

That's the problem.

Fractured market = lots of little markets for news, and international news organizations cost money. I think that eventually newspapers of a given ideological stripe will pool their resources--e.g., NYT will contribute reporting to Nezavisimaya gazeta, Wyborcza gazeta, The Dawn, and other papers, in exchange for using their resources. So the NYT's "overseas reporters" will be working for other papers.

But the media market's also fragmented. My wife just skips the news. She watches channels with no news, so there's no newsroom for her "viewing profit" to support. It used to be that stations as a whole would support their newsrooms. And as news viewership declines--after all, given 800 channels, social networking sites, and other "activities", who needs news?

I can't blame the idiocy lurking in the NYT or CNN. Talking heads are boring, and people have low boredom thresholds these days.

But you should try spending a few months in a small country and reading their local reporting. It'd give you a whole new regard for much American media.

[LiberalEsto]

3. I was a newspaper reporter for many years

I worked for four NJ papers from 1972 to 1990, and a Maryland paper from 1993 to 1997. Of those, three have disappeared. One was bought by Gannett, merged with another paper and turned into a flimsy shadow of its former self. So only one out of five still exists.

And it wasn't my fault!
:D

[Joanne98]

4. This is what happens when you put shareholder's profits ahead of running your business.

They've been slashing reporter jobs to cut cost, which will just make the problem worse. They need to buy back shares until they get enough to go back to being privately owned. Reporters could help. They could form an organization to buy as many newspaper shares as possible. Then they could defend the quality of the news at shareholder meetings.

[MicaelS]

5. Newspapers have for far too long

Had a business model that subsidized the news operations through advertising. With advertisers leaving for other more fallow fields, the old business model of the cheap newspaper subsidized by advertisements can no longer be supported. Newspapers are going to have adapt or they will die, it's as simple as that.