Newspapers: Dinosaurs of the Digital Age

Submitted by Ryan McConnell on October 5, 2005 - 11:44pm.

Though not available online , Ken Auletta wrote a must-read piece in this week's New Yorker about the state of the newspaper industry amid constant cost-cutting pressures driven by Wall Street's emphasis on the bottom-line. Auletta doesn't paint a pretty picture, either for consumers of news or potential practioners of it like many of us. Some highlights:

  • The population of the US has increased 64 percent in last forty years, yet newspaper circulation has declined 3.6 million, to which Auletta commented, "There is something prehistoric" about the process of printing and delivering news in the form of a newspaper in the digital age.
  • Despite winning an unprecedented five Pulitzer prizes in 2004, the LA Times business management staff not only greeted the awards for excellence in reporting with indifference, but demanded "large newsroom cuts" two months later. Furthermore, one LA Times editor claimed Scott Smith, president of the LA Times, told him that "I don't think you always have to hire the best people," implying that he was just as concerned with keeping the price down as he was on the quality of journalism.
  • Even better: The average age of newspaper reader is 53, and "Baby Boomers read newspaper one-third less than their parents and the Gen-Xersread the newspapers another one-third less than Boomers."
  • Clearly, there's a deep chasm between the business and editorial sides of the news business. The business side wants a market-driven approach -- give the people what they want, they seem to say, not what some high-falutin journalist class thinks they should want. Meanwhile, Dean Baquet -- who had a minor role in the Seth Mnookin book "Hard News" -- sums up the editorial side's perspective by saying, "It's not always our job to give readers what they want. What if they don't want war coverage or foreign coverage or to see poverty in their communities?"

    • As someone with six years experience in marketing, I know full well the insidious influence of advertising. I've been in situations where I've been told to "massage the numbers" to make them more palatable to Wall Street. I've seen first-hand what the pressure of"reaching an (often unreachable) sales goal has upon the emotional lives of many good people. I know I'll sound like a hopeless idealist, but I wish there was a way for everyone to take a step back and realize that there are more important things than making the most amount of money possible, ethics or principles be damned. I know I'm making a huge generalization; many, if not most, businesses are run in an ethical manner. But I keep waiting for sanity to prevail, for people to realize the importance of being informed, of being well educated, of keeping the powerful in check, yet it's becoming more and more difficult to avoid the trappings of cynicism as it seems all people really care about is their paycheck and Lindsey Lohan's recent car crash. Perhaps it'll change. Otherwise, I fear my J-school diploma will amount to just one very expensive piece of paper.

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