Goodbye to Newspapers!

One thing I think that people like Russell Baker don't get about the ongoing demise of newspapers, is that technological change actually has created a situation where the world has too many newspapers. He writes, for example, that:

Besides the Los Angeles Times, the papers showing the ravages of extensive cost-cutting include many once ranked among the country's finest: The Baltimore Sun, The Miami Herald, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Des Moines Register, The Hartford Courant, the Louisville Courier-Journal, the San Jose Mercury News, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, for example.

Now, I mean, you have to ask yourself why do these papers exist at all? Suppose that besides the Associated Press and Reuters and ABC and NBC and CBS and CNN and PBS and NPR, the only domestic sources of congressional coverage were The Washington Post and the DC bureaus of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal what, exactly, would be the problem? The problem can't be that the world needs more than eleven different people writing the story on last night's Senate filibuster. Rather, the problem is that, historically, it's been hard to get the New York Times or The Washington Post or The Wall Street Journal in San Jose or Miami or Saint Louis.

Baker snarks that "How the Internet might replace the newspaper as a source of information is never explained by those who assure you that it will." But it's clear enough. "The Internet" can't replace The Los Angeles Times's congressional coverage, but the congressional coverage of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post (plus the wire services, plus the non-print media) plus The Hill plus (if you're willing to pay) CongressDaily, CQ, and Roll Call most certainly can. What "the Internet" can do is make it very, very, very easy for a person in Los Angeles to access that kind of coverage.

The existence of "more newspapers" is very good for newspaper writers -- it means more journalism jobs. But if you live in Miami, then the San Jose Mercury News (which still does some excellent work, mind you) doesn't do you any good in the pre-internet era. Thanks to the internet, you can read any newspaper from anywhere. Which is great for newspaper readers. But it means the world doesn't need nearly as much duplication of the basic national news function. Which is -- I don't deny it -- probably bad for journalists. But I think it's good for journalism.

Or, at a minimum, it's good for journalism about national politics. And I'm pretty sure it's good for journalism about international issues. It may well be bad for reporting on local issues.

Comments

I think you're discounting the impact of reporting on local issues. The Baltimore Sun ran a series of stories on a feudal land law still being applied in Baltimore to eject people from homes that they own over debts as small as $30. As much as I like the Post and the Times, I just don't see them wandering around Canton and Cherry Hill talking to people about ground rents. The Sun's series made a huge impact in the state, ground rent reform was one of the first bills addressed in the legislative session earlier this year.

Posted by Mike | July 26, 2007 2:23 PM

Don't see how it can be a good thing. You now will have fewer reporters reporting. That means its much easier to avoid any coverage of issues.

Posted by Rob | July 26, 2007 2:25 PM

I actually think this could be good for local issues coverage in the long run. While I don't need the Miami Herald's national coverage in Minnesota, I may be interested in their local coverage. Conversely, you're probably not interested in the Star Tribune's national coverage, but you may be interested in more coverage of the Coleman/Franken race.

If the newspaper survives it will be in back to the future mode -- going to tell local stories first again.

Posted by Jeff Fecke | July 26, 2007 2:28 PM

Can I remind you, MY, that the only news organization to get the pre-Iraq invasion WMD coverage right was Knight-Ridder -- an organization whose national reporting almost certainly would not exist in the post-consolidation Utopia you long for. Leaving all of the national reporting to the Times, Post and WSJ? Shudder.

Posted by Glenn | July 26, 2007 2:31 PM

Why is it good for journalism? I thought competition was a good thing.

Generalities aside, isn't it generally accepted that the Knight-Ridder papers did a much better job covering the runup to the Iraq War than the NYT? And if you read the Daily Howler on a regular basis, you aren't going to be comfortable having to rely on the cool kids at the NYT and the Washington Post to keep us informed about what's happening in the world of politics.

Posted by Donald Johnson | July 26, 2007 2:34 PM

You neglect the fact that the three voices you feel can fill teh vacuum are the three voices that most people on the internet recognize as the voices that have stood silent throughout the past seven miserable years.

If it not for the Miami Herald and San Jose MN, you wouldn't have had Knight Ridder reporters shedding light where the Timesmen fear to tread. The Louisville Courier and Toledo Blade have opened our eyes to war crimes that the Posties are too smug to care about. The Boston Globe has helped us understand the Bush administration's contempt for the American Constitution.

And the WSJ, what can I say. It's the only paper where I read the print edition daily. Teh reporting and the writing is the best by far. Unfortunately because of its editorial voice it has much less revelance and things will get worse under Murdoch.

Posted by Gustavo | July 26, 2007 2:34 PM

Just to be contrarian... what if it's easier to defy the CW with fewer reporters, because it's harder to tell what that CW is? There's less of a herd, less groupthink?

The Mets had a roomful of people agree to the Kazmir for Zambrano trade. But one or two people may not have been able to achieve that level of pathological decisionmaking processes.

Hey, it's a theory...

Posted by Elvis Elvisberg | July 26, 2007 2:38 PM

And one more thing. The Times and the Post are probably our two most biased newspapers. Their bias is not left or right. They are biased towards the institution of which they are keystones.

Posted by Gustavo | July 26, 2007 2:38 PM

I echo the others here. Considering the bird cage lining they have become, who wants to rely on the NYT or WaPo and now the WSJ for all their national coverage? If you want that, why not just watch Faux Noise Channel all the time? They are one in the same these days.

Posted by Joe Klein's conscience | July 26, 2007 2:40 PM

an organization whose national reporting almost certainly would not exist in the post-consolidation Utopia you long for.

Why is that clear? McClatchey seems to have geared up to push itself forward as a paper worth "serious" respect--which it (or its Knight Ridder predecessor) should probably already have, on the basis of pre-invasion reporting and SJ Merc--just as the LAT (once a joke) and WaPo (once a joke) did in the past. A smaller field of voices doesn't mean no one will compete. And if there are few enough voices to identify each, one way to compete will be to offer a different sounding voice.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | July 26, 2007 2:41 PM

Competition hasn't helped the journalistic environment all that much in Washington - it's still pretty much court stenography across the board. That's more a reflection of Rovian message control than reporting, but I have to agree with Matt that twelve different stenographers do a job that could be done by one.

Most of the interesting tea leaf reading is done on analysis sites anyway. Case in point from today: NPR Morning Edition gives a flat report of General Odinerio saying "Iraqi terrorists are being trained in Iran". What they left out was this is same mouthpiece that reported a fellow killed two years ago and the same fellow killed a few weeks ago, all before learning the fellow in question was an actor.

If the job is stenography, one will suffice. And TPM is doing more leak coverage than any individual paper I've seen.

Let the people who would have been Washington reporters/analysts (back when analysis was part of a job) become independent analysts available on the web everywhere, and leave the newspaper court stenographers to a small pool. The local papers can use those reports, as well as Thomas, congressional PR outlets and the various watchdogs do write the local angle on the Washington legislative happenings.

Like the buggy whip makers one hundred years ago, sometimes you have to go into a new line of work.

Posted by LittlePig | July 26, 2007 2:48 PM

>>McClatchey seems to have geared up to push itself forward as a paper worth "serious" respect

McClatchey is no more a newspaper tahn the Sulzberg Times or Graham Post.

These are reporters who worked for highly respected KR newspapers around the country and eventually became Washington correspondents for said newspapers.

By the way, those individual newspapers probably commanded more respect and follow-up coverage than the pooled service. Back when the Miami Herald, the Mercury News, or the Inquirer broke important news it was immediately followed up on by the networks and the big two. Nowadays, the McClatchey's consistently break news that is invisible to all but news junkies on the net.

Posted by Gustavo | July 26, 2007 2:49 PM

I think the result of reducing national and international news coverage to a few outfits will be that facts that embarrass the powers that be just won't be reported at all.

In the old system, a lot of newspapers had their own correspondents and at any given point of time, some of them were trying to really do their jobs.

Posted by strings | July 26, 2007 2:51 PM

Why is that clear?

Well, for one, it was Matt's Utopia I was referring to, and he, in his post, only envisions a world of Times/Post/WSJ plus maybe CQ and the Hill.

More broadly, if his assumption is that it's a good thing to only have 3 or 4 "national" DC news bureaus, it seems difficult for me to believe that McClatchy would have the economic might to be one of those 3 or 4.

Posted by Glenn | July 26, 2007 2:53 PM

Don't even know why I'm so passionate about this (Dad was an editor at Miami Herald), but I'm in finance), but....

>>And TPM is doing more leak coverage than any individual paper I've seen.

Uhhh. No.

TPM is reading more individual "little" newspapers around the country and piecing the stories together better anyone has ever been able to do. JMM has consistently attributed his success to the story in the San Diego Times Union that seems to have something in common with something in the Strib, whicj is oddly like the story in the Little Rock Gazzette.

But, under this new monopolistic political voice at least the Linsey Laytons of the world would not have to be bored to death by the US Attorney's scandal. No one would ever have noticed it.

Who keew? Karl Rove and Matt Yglesias in bed together ;)

Posted by Gustavo | July 26, 2007 2:57 PM

Especially since all mainstream journalists tend to say The Exact Same Thing when reporting on any given story. If they all agree to work from one script, why do we need them all out there?

Posted by bob somerby | July 26, 2007 3:17 PM

> Uhhh. No.
>
> TPM is reading more individual "little"
> newspapers around the country and piecing the
> stories together better anyone has ever been able
> to do.

Except that we have seen in the last 6 years that the traditional media does very little primary source reporting, and generally works with a blend of the piecing you describe above, calling press secretaries to get position statements, and taking off-the-record inteviews with anonymous SAOs.

The only primary source reporting that I see these days is in the Wall Street Journal and on very focused blogs. The thought of the typical Washington Post national reporter groveling through 10,000s of thousands of pages of data dumps as both Firedoglake and TPMMuckraker's readers did is laughable.

Cranky

Posted by Cranky Observer | July 26, 2007 3:18 PM

"It may well be bad for reporting on local issues."

Ya think? Ya think that if you live in Kansas City, or Chicago, or Little Rock you might have a hard time finding out what was happening in your city reading the Washington Post?

Posted by Alan Vanneman | July 26, 2007 3:37 PM

"Ya think? Ya think that if you live in Kansas City, or Chicago, or Little Rock you might have a hard time finding out what was happening in your city reading the Washington Post?"

What do you define as "happening in your city"? If you define that as "announcing used car sales", "hyping up local real estate", "exagerating local crime" or the local weather report, I suppose that's happening in those cities.

I assume though that you're talking about local politics. And that's a mixed picture now as opposed to previously. Almost all cities now have just one paper, and the strong tendency is for that single paper to get in bed in local power structures. In my city (San Francisco), our local paper (the Krunk) covers local politics so negligently and incoherently that most people here who are local political junkies get info from either gossip, rumors or blogs. The Krunk, of course, is essentially going out of business anyway.

Posted by burritoboy | July 26, 2007 3:48 PM

burritoboy,

Perhaps by "wwhat's happening in your city," he means, you know ... what's happening in your city. The thing we often call "news." Lots of people still care about it.

Posted by too many steves | July 26, 2007 3:54 PM

What the fuck have you been smoking? I know it's hard to believe on the coasts, but things of national importance can happen outside of New York, Washington DC and California. Hard to believe but true.

Posted by Gus | July 26, 2007 4:06 PM

> he means, you know ... what's happening in
> your city. The thing we often call "news."
> Lots of people still care about it.

Right. Except less and less of such is being reported every year. Even the Chicago Tribune, a large paper by current standards, is now down to a pathetically small level of original local content. And what there is slants increasingly toward the preferred narrative of the local power elite.

Cranky

Posted by Cranky Observer | July 26, 2007 4:07 PM

By having a multitude of papers each reporting on the world with a slightly different perspective we get a more detailed and deeper understanding of our world. I'm surprised a blogger like Matthew misses the point of having many separate newspapers, because blogs have given me access to so much more information than when I subscribed to the NY Times and WaPo.

He wrote: "he problem can't be that the world needs more than eleven different people writing the story on last night's Senate filibuster."

My answer to that, is no single newspaper can -- or wants to -- cover ALL the angles of a big story, or to cover all the ancillary stories related to the big story, or to cover all the stories of secondary importance that would never make the front page. The WaPo is unique in that it has a reporter/columnist like Froomkin making digests of what other papers nationwide are reporting. If those other papers nationwide did not exist, it would be a great loss.

Posted by beowulf888 | July 26, 2007 4:08 PM

Maybe a bit off point, but one reason that many, many newspaper readers prefer "local" newspapers to the "paper of record" is the sports page. As a lifelong Detriot Tigers fan living in DC, I look at the Detroit Free Press on-line much more often than one would expect for one who gets the Post delivered at home. Because, um, the Post doesn't have a Tigers beat writer. But if the Freep were to go under, I doubt any other paper (D-News aside) would pick up a Tigers beat writer.

I'm a politics junkie, but like many newspaper readers, I start with the Sports page. This is probably especially true when one is married to another politics junkie. She gets the A section, I get the Sports.

But back to the point--from a sports fan perspective, there aren't too many newspapers. ESPN doesn't fill the gap, because it is so-o-o-o focused on the Yankees and Red Sox.

Posted by Emery | July 26, 2007 4:09 PM

so you're in favor of outsourcing to india and elsewhere?

Posted by dj superflat | July 26, 2007 4:12 PM

Jesus Matt, you're usually spot-on with most posts, but this is insane.

The NY TImes, the Washington Post and the (soon-to-be Murdoch's) WSJ??

Yes, those bastions of journalism that gave us Whitewater, the Gore 'scandals', and the Iraq War...sign me up!!

Posted by Andruw | July 26, 2007 4:24 PM

"Which is -- I don't deny it -- probably bad for journalists"

Please. They'll get jobs as writing copy for corporate PR flacks.

Once a whore......

Posted by freejack | July 26, 2007 4:28 PM

The internet reduces the revenue sources for local (print) newspapers, which are going to suffer. But is also reduces the costs of producing a local (now online) paper.

I think that the geographic scale of local coverage is going to change. There is little need now for, say, the Columbus Dispatch, a regional paper that isn't very good. But it is much easier now for folks to organize good coverage of a neighborhood or a small town.

I am in New Haven, CT. We get terribly bad news local coverage from the "New Haven" Register. But we get great news coverage from www.newhavenindependent.org. The latter is a non-profit.

Posted by Esbey | July 26, 2007 5:35 PM

"It may well be bad for local journalism"??? It sucks for local journalism. It sucks for local journalism even in New York City with three supposed newspapers. The NYTimes' local journalism is horrible. The Post and the News are crap on any subject. We had much better local coverage when New York Newsday was here but sadly they've retreated back to Long Island. And local coverage REALLY MATTERS. How do you think Josh Marshall was able to track the politics of the Social Security fight so well? Lots of updates about the stand being taken by various congressman came via local papers.

Posted by lyofbrooklyn | July 26, 2007 5:37 PM

The reason local newspapers were ubiquitous (and a good investment) years ago wasn't because it was hard to get national papers like the WSJ and NY Times in other parts of the country, but because local newspapers' classifieds sections performed an essential function in pre-Internet times.

Posted by Fred | July 26, 2007 6:39 PM

"what's happening in your city. The thing we often call "news." Lots of people still care about it."

As they should. But most newspapers are doing increasingly little of covering real local news. And the most important part of local news, local politics is one of the worst covered.

So, would you rather have a single newspaper, which is heavily reliant on the local powers-that-be, and thus likely to either ignore or minimize or distory local political news OR a handful of people producing in-depth investigative reporting? Do we need to pay for the newspaper's horoscope and obituary writer to get the political news?

Posted by burritoboy | July 26, 2007 6:39 PM

There are plenty of reasons to read (or at least buy) your local newspaper.

1. Coupons from local supermarket. Yes, you can get the current sheet in the supermarket, but good planning of your shopping trips benefits from having coupon sheets in advance. From what I have heard, this is truly reason number 1.

2. Reporting on highschool sports. Here the national press is worthless.

3. News on local construction projects, and even elections. How do you, smart asses, properly choose among the candidates for the Recorder of Deeds?

4. Further down priority list, advise articles adapted to local needs, on gardening, hunting, gathering, whatever.

Posted by piotr | July 26, 2007 7:02 PM

If I am reading Matt correctly, then he has gotten it wrong here.

In the internet age you either have to be the biggest kid on the block (NY Times / WashPost) or have a NICHE (Santa Rosa Press Democrat). This is what all that talk about the "long tail" is about.

Big newspapers like NYTimes are safe since they are the big enough to survive (with some adjustment). Local newspapers are safe because they have a niche topic not covered by the big newspapers (ie local news).

The newspapers that are going to die are the ones which are neither local news nor big national newspapers.

Posted by Chris Albon | July 26, 2007 7:03 PM

Yeah, dude, this is so wrongheaded. Local newspapers like The (Louisville) Courier-Journal and others on your list stand or fall on their coverage of their region. In The C-J's case, it has long been a government watchdog -- its coverage has led time and again to changes in laws, such as those governing mine safety.

It is tragic what's happening to papers like that one as their budgets and staffing are cut. That vital watchdog role can wind up crippled.

Not everything is about national politics.

Posted by Bat of Moon | July 26, 2007 8:33 PM

I know this is a political blog, but there is a lot more in local newspapers than coverage of politics. Even one reference above when talking about "local" politics referred to how local members of Congress were voting.

Newspapers do have local business news and listings of local events and interviews with local people who are doing things. And sports. And local quasi-politics such as libraries. And local religious activities. Now, you may not find this coverage very good, and that's fine. But to just say newspapers are dead, or useless, simply because they are not obsessive about politics is to make the newspaper something it has never been.

(As for what would save the Chron and other metro dailies -- forget trying to compete with the CoCo Times and the Merc and just concentrate on the city and the inner-ring suburbs. If the reason papers can make a go of it in Vallejo and Stockton is local news, then do that. The problem, as Atrios notes, is that that is not why reporters go to papers like the Chron.)

Posted by David Sullivan | July 26, 2007 8:43 PM

The UK, with a population 1/5 of the US, has at 13 national daily newspapers with lobby correspondents, 11 Sunday papers and 21 regional newspapers/newspaper groups. I realise the US media market is very different, but I think it can support more than three newspapers with Congressional coverage. I can't believe you're saying that we should restrict the sources of coverage of Washington further after the continuing fiascos of the last decade of the White House press corps, and moreover should restrict it to the worst offenders.

Posted by Ginger Yellow | July 26, 2007 8:53 PM

Folks who think vibrant local papers are useless totally miss the picture. Granted, not every city needs a full-time staff member dedicated to full time coverage of Washington DC or to national/international affairs . . . but state and local news are still very significant. Sports, obituaries, local politics, business, and other local stuff can be very very important for people to know about in order to be informed citizens where they live.

Sure, a local paper might be in bed with the county seat power structure when it comes to zoning or the new water plant, but even biased reporting is better than no record of what's being discussed at all. Unless the paper has no journalistic standards at all dissenting voices will have *some* appearance in it.

I think there are *a lot* of places where newspapers could provide $0.50 a day's worth of information. What is really hurting papers is not some sort of platonic redundancy where people are uninterested in local news because they can read national news on the internet, but that people are turning to Craig's List, Ebay, or other internet venues for what in the past would have been handled through Want Ads or other paid advertisements. In terms of staying informed, local papers are still quite relevant to consumers. The problem is, a major portion of their revenue stream is drying up. Your local paper's want ads truly *are* redundant by the internet, 2 or 3 gi-normous auction houses really are better than 1000 smaller swap meets.

Posted by William | July 26, 2007 10:22 PM

This post is so stupid it makes one wonder. Is Matt finally making his play for pundit superstardom?

Posted by Mark | July 26, 2007 11:38 PM

The strange thing about America is that you have so many *huge* local newspapers and so few national newspapers of even medium size. The WSJ and USA Today both have a circulation of 2 million, which would put them outside the top three newspapers in the UK. (and the US is five times the population of the UK). On the other hand, London is a city of 7 million people and the Evening Standard has a lower circulation than the Hartford Courant.

Posted by dsquared | July 27, 2007 3:40 AM

To split another hair, local papers report in detail on the consequences - intended or not - of laws passed and decisions made in DC. Katrina, as one example, is both a local and national story, and it's the NO Times-Picayune, not WaPo or NYT, that documents the effects of FEMA policy.

Posted by csp | July 27, 2007 8:56 AM

burritoboy, I tend to agree that local coverage is lacking in current dailies, I just don't see how eliminating newspapers helps that situation. Since I live in Minneapolis, I have two local papers I can read, and, while they have their flaws, overall they're not horrible. I doubt that there will still be two major metro newspapers here in 5 years, and I think it will be a loss. Are bloggers supposed to fill in the gap? Please.

Posted by Gus | July 27, 2007 11:23 AM

" On the other hand, London is a city of 7 million people and the Evening Standard has a lower circulation than the Hartford Courant."

To be fair, this is because a) the Evening Standard is godawful, and b) it has not one but three free competitors, one of which is published by the same company. That said, the lack of a real national newspaper in the US (USA Today is a joke) is baffling to me. I suspect without evidence it may have something to do with commuting patterns.

Posted by Ginger Yellow | July 27, 2007 11:53 AM

Wow, this is just a staggeringly misinformed post by Matt. I'm stunned, frankly. It demonstrates a total lack of understanding of how journalism actually works on a national level. What happened?

But if you live in Miami, then the San Jose Mercury News (which still does some excellent work, mind you) doesn't do you any good in the pre-internet era.

This is just plain false and so naive is to border on stupid. If the Miami Herald and the San Jose Mercury News both have full-time reporters in Washington, and the San Jose reporter breaks a big story, the Miami reader certainly benefits. She may not read the breaking story in the San Jose Mercury News the next morning, but the Miami Herald will report on significant stories broken by other papers the very next day.

Here's the starting point: The more serious journalists there are in Washington, the more stories will emerge. Everyone benefits from this.

There are two ways that serious Washington journalism gets done by newspapers. The first way involves big papers like the Times or the Post or the Journal spending serious time and money to break a story on their own. With fewer and fewer papers sending their own reporters to Washington, this job increasingly falls on "the big three" papers. The second way serious Washington journalism gets done is through teamwork between competing reporters and papers. Reporter/Paper A breaks the first part of a story, Reporter/Paper B breaks the second part, etc. The story builds as each reporter contributes his own "mini-scoop" to the narrative. And again, with fewer and fewer papers sending their own reporters to Washingont, this job increasingly falls on "the big three" papers.

(Why is that we still don't know what the "other" secret NSA spying program is? Is it because on information exists? Is it because no reporter has chased the story hard enough? Or is it because the NY Times and WaPo are too scared to print it? All I know is that the chances of us knowing would be higher if more reporters from more newspapers were in Washington right now.)

Finally, there is the issue of competition for stories. The more serious journalists there are in Washington, the more pressure there is to break out of the official narrative, to dig up juicy stories, to dig behind "this week's fillibuster" to find the nugget of interest. The fewer reporters there are, the less competition there is for stories. That's why this is so wrong:

But it means the world doesn't need nearly as much duplication of the basic national news function. Which is -- I don't deny it -- probably bad for journalists. But I think it's good for journalism.

Good reporters aren't stenographers. They don't duplicate each other's work. They are always looking for a unique hook, a way to explain what happened using different sources than the next reporter.

If there are only three reporters covering a given story, the public will get far less detail, texture, and background than if there are 10 reporters. Christ, just look at the coverage of the same event in the Times and the Post - it is dramatically different on a routine basis. Does Matt realize that virtually all of the grand wisdom of the blogosphere that follows such a story only comes from these two sources? What other facts would the blogosphere have to work with if, say, the Boston Globe also sent Charlie Pierce to investigate the story? Well, guess what: the Globe ain't sending Charlie Pierce. Because it's not a national newspaper any more.

None of this is rocket science. Anyone who has ever worked at a newspaper understands the thrill a reporter gets when he beats the "big guys" on a scoop. Hell, when I was in college reporting for a local weekly, my single best moment as a reporter involved beating the local daily to a major story. And my editors were ready to take some serious chances to make a splash. They wanted attention; to make a splash. There weren't thinking: "what's safe?" This happens at all levels of journalism, but the fewer reporters there are, the less it happens.

Posted by owenz | July 27, 2007 12:16 PM

"3. News on local construction projects, and even elections. How do you, smart asses, properly choose among the candidates for the Recorder of Deeds?"

The way everybody else actually does: either pick randomly, pick by party, decide who has the best sounding name or just leave it blank. Seriously, there's no useful information about the race for Recorder of Deeds in the paper - I've never even seen an article about any race in San Francisco below the level of City Treasurer or Board of the Community College District.

Posted by burritoboy | July 27, 2007 1:51 PM