IT’S A NEW year, a new semester and, in less than a week, a new presidential administration will take office. The future is now. It’s new and it’s shiny and it’s full of promise.
But so was the 1958 Edsel.
For a while.
The dawning year will likely mark another significant decline in the very thing you’re reading now. Newspapers’ ad revenue is falling to the point that some papers are actually losing money — and owning a newspaper press used to be akin to owning a press that printed money. Lots of newspapers are still making lots of money, of course, but not as much as they used to. Not as much as their owners have become accustomed to. So drastic things are happening. Staffs are being cut. Circulation areas are being shrunk. No one in their right mind would expect reducing quality and the number of people served to fix the problem, and it hasn’t.
Nevertheless, newspaper companies are doing more of the same. Last year, more than 15,586 newspaper jobs were cut. More than 300 have been cut in this shiny new year.
Newspapers are publishing less often. The Christian Science Monitor, for instance, is going to weekend-only publication, concentrating on its online version. The Tribune Co. — whose holdings include the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun and the Chicago Cubs — is filing for bankruptcy. The New York Times has mortgaged its headquarters.
You can buy one share of The New York Times Co. for about the same price as a six-pack of imported stout. A share of Media General, which includes the Richmond Times-Dispatch and Charlottesville’s Daily Progress among its holdings, will set you back less than a McDonald’s Value Meal.
Seattle’s newspaper is for sale. Its owners say that if a buyer doesn’t step up in the next 55 days or so, the paper will close.
Two of Virginia’s largest newspapers were for sale until their owners figured that no one wanted to buy them — at least, no one who could raise the money to close the deal.
So what? Newspapers are so 20th century. Even 19th century. If they evaporate, we’ll all still be able to get news from Web sites and blogs and Twitter and even cable television, though that’s a little old fashioned. Right?
With all the new media, wisdom-of-crowds outlets at our disposal, who needs the mainstream media, especially the dead tree version of newspapers?
Remember what Thomas Jefferson said: “The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.”
Of course, Mr. Jefferson also said, “... [w]ere it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.”
What the founder of the University was talking about in that second quote, of course, wasn’t newspapers per se. It was the idea of newspapers as watchdogs. “No government ought to be without censors,” Mr. Jefferson wrote. “And where the press is free, no one ever will.”
As Enron, mortgage backed securities and Bernard Madoff have reminded us, government isn’t alone in its need of close observation. And, as bad as they can be, newspapers really are the best watchdogs we have. Neither local television nor local radio stations nor bloggers nor online-only outlets routinely show up at local government meetings. A lot of those bloggers and online-only outlets get most of their content from newspapers. The online folks comment much more than they report. And when they report, their reporting might be a bit suspect. Joe the Plumber, made famous through a confrontation with Barrack Obama — a confrontation in which virtually everything Joe said turned out to be fictional — is now a Web site war correspondent.
Newspapers have fallen down a good bit. They’ve fallen well short of their calling way too often. But newspapers are more dogged watchdogs than any other media out there. They do most of the investigative reporting that’s done in this country. And their online versions haven’t figured out how to generate enough money to support that kind of reporting.
There are some hopeful signs. Pro Publica (at propublica.org) has one potential answer. Lots of other ideas are sprouting, but none of them seem to be maturing as quickly as newspapers are fading away.
Newspapers don’t have to survive in order for our democratic republic to flourish. But something has to fill their role — something that’s not here yet.
As students at one of the most prestigious university’s in the country, you’re often called the leaders and the hope of the future. I hope you’re hard at work on figuring out how newspapers’ duties will be fulfilled when newspapers aren’t here.
If you’re not, get busy.
Tim Thornton is The Cavalier Daily’s Ombudsman. He can be reached at ombud@cavalierdaily.com.
Read More
PARTING SHOT: Staying the course
By Elizabeth Parsons | 8 hours agoStorytelling is powerful, and writing for The Cavalier Daily has empowered me to share my own stories and the stories of others.
PARTING SHOT: Without sorrow
By Jackie Bond | YesterdayAs difficult as college was, I did not drop out, I did not give up on myself or my friends in times of need and I shared my voice at every opportunity. And that is something worth celebrating.
PARTING SHOT: The myth of the “two Universities”
By Dan Freed | YesterdayThere’s a reason basketball has a color commentator in addition to play-by-play commentary — and it is the same reason why Opinion sections exist.
