Let There Be News

Do the financial problems and looming editorial cutbacks at The Los Angeles Times signal a giant social problem as we become a news-poor society? Michael O'Hare makes the case. Personally, I tend to take an optimistic view of the technology-driven decline of the newspapering business model. The thing of it is that the very same IT developments that are killing newspapers also make it possible for newspapers to have much broader reach in terms of the sheer number of people for whom it's convenient to read them. On the internet it's a simple matter to habitually scan the front pages of three or four different major papers. It's also a simple matter to go read a newspaper published in England or Australia or South Africa or Lebanon or Singapore if you happen to have reason to believe that it'll contain something you're interested in.

In other words, the world could move to a state where there are orders of magnitude fewer papers than their used to be but wherein individual consumers actually have substantially more news sources they can draw from in practice.

The fly in the ointment, on this optimistic take, is local news. Really big cities will probably be okay. And residents of medium-sized cities should have better national and world news options than ever before. But who's going to be the guy who does investigative reporting into government corruption in a medium-sized city? I couldn't really say. Local news websites like DCist are a valuable contribution to our media ecology, but much like political blogs they don't really seem able to substitute for the core news-gathering function of a local paper. One possibility is that this is an area where we're going to have to hope to see some philanthropic activity; NPR provides a partial model for a heavyweight, somewhat decentralized news-gathering non-profit operation.

Comments

In other words, the world could move to a state where there are orders of magnitude fewer papers than their used to be but wherein individual consumers actually have substantially more news sources

Yes, Matt, but all those sources will be of the type that tends to benefit from a highly corporatized, consolidated model of media. It shouldn't take a genius to see how in short order this could tend to produce a certain bias in the news one gets.

Posted by dj moonbat | October 8, 2006 11:27 AM

Query whether there is much good reporting in medium-sized cities right now. The papers outside of major cities are famously bad.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | October 8, 2006 11:37 AM

But how do those internet mega-papers make any money? I'm happy "to habitually scan the front pages of three or four different major papers" when its free, but if there's a subscription price...? Yes, they'll be able to sell ads, but I can't imagine that that will be as lucrative (or nearly as effective) as ads in print newspapers are now.

- Robert, a not-optimistic paper LA Times subscriber.

Posted by Robert Earle | October 8, 2006 11:44 AM

There's a terrible long-term trend (in TV and print both) of decreasing expenditure on reporting. I don't think that the internet mega-papers earn enough to pay reporters. that's the rotten spot of the internet revolution.

Posted by John Emerson | October 8, 2006 2:12 PM

Yeah, as people are saying, I think the problem is that there just isn't a revenue model to keep a large newsgathering operation going. Local TV station (and local NPR stations, per Matt's comment) have only a handful of reporters. They can do the big stories of the day, but don't have the resources to cover school boards and sports teams and utilities.

Even more troubling, however, is that without local newspapers to pay for the system and provide some of the initial reporting, the Associated Press falls apart. Most people don't realize what a huge deal that is.

Posted by ARW | October 8, 2006 3:00 PM

"The News" was an artificially, manufactured product.

The means of production are now owned by everyone.

Posted by hodgepodge | October 8, 2006 4:38 PM

Matt's obviously right because we are already immersed in the situation he describes. The big city dailies are sinking slowly in the tar pits but this is simply a modest acceleration of a trend that has been underway since at least the 1950's. It may go to end-state because of the Internet, but it didn't start for that reason. Urban dailies have been dying for decades. As recently as the mid 60's cities as small as Milwaukee still had two papers. Only a handful of large cities have more than one daily paper now. New York has, I think, four, now, but it once had upwards of a dozen. L.A. has the Times and the much smaller Daily News, plus the Register in Orange County. The late Herald-Examiner folded up in the 80's, well before the Internet had been heard of by much of anyone outside of technical geekdom.

So I think djmoonbat has it pretty much backwards (not an altogether novel circumstance to be sure). Centralized, corporate media outlets have been dying for a long time, not sweeping all before them.

As for who is going to do the Pultizer-winning exposes of local corruption in the future, I think a better question might be who's doing them now? The L.A. Times, for example, plays a lot of local favorites for both ideological and pecuniary reasons in its local market. The triple sewers which are L.A. city and county government, plus the L.A. Unified School District pretty much get a pass, unless there's a Republican councilman or supervisor involved. The Times itself was a featured player in a wee scandal involving a New Orleans-size breach in the dike allegedly separating editorial and ad sales for a little deal they had going with the Staples Center sports and convention complex here a couple of years back.

I think we will find that good investigative journalism is more a product of interest and tenacity than big-buck backing. As more little Internet-based outlets sprout up, this is going to become clearer and clearer. Blogs have already done a fair amount of real journalism, especially of the muck-raking expose type. How much of a bankroll do they have?

Posted by Dick Eagleson | October 9, 2006 12:56 AM

The Guardian has a news podcast they put out, and one piece a couple weeks ago was on the rise of the free papers that have been starting up in London. While they're targeted for commuters on the Tube, I think they're an example of local coverage.

In my hometown, Indianapolis, there's a weekly paper called NUVO. It's free, you can pick it up at various points around the city and out into the suburbs. And they do have some decent local coverage of politics and concerns that wouldn't be covered by national news. And they give a better (if only supplemental) view on these issues than the Gannon-owned Indianapolis Star.

I guess what I'm getting at is these long-established local free weeklies, which for so long have been for finding movie times and concert dates, may pick up some of the local coverage slack. I know it does for me.

Posted by Jeremy Eades | October 9, 2006 1:34 AM

How much could the times save by dumping Jonah and maybe the entire opinion section? The Times' editorials are "sensible" mush and the columnists are either unoriginal, weak or liars.
On the letters page you will have two or three locals on one side so the paper will print a letter from someone in Scottsdale for balance. WTF. The news stories, especially the multi-part frontpagers, are usually good however. If TribCo killed the syndicated columns, the Current, and the Sunday Magazine I would still subscribe. Has anyone had a paper that was solely news?
(the bastards are not even covering Kings road games this season so I can't wait to see what else they stop covering)

Posted by puckhead | October 9, 2006 3:26 AM

Look at the economics of newspapers.

They use to have a big advantage in the distribution
of want ads.

But the internet took that away from them.

However, the profits from the want ads were used
to cross-subsidize the expensive job of news "gathering".

Moreover, the news delivers on the internet are "free
riding" on the newspapers expensive collection efforts.

So as the news shifts from the newspapers to the internet
who is going to pay to "gather" the news.

Posted by spencer | October 9, 2006 1:27 PM

Hate to raise this possibility, but is the audience even there? Maybe nobody really cares if their government is governing badly. Doesn't the response to Bush sort of demonstrate this?

On the other hand, local TV news still gets a bit of mileage out of finding especially picturesque government screw-ups. But only things that can be explained in less than 30 seconds and have high entertainment value.

Posted by MQ | October 10, 2006 2:13 AM