Chaos Program

The subject of my last post, the serious problems faced by news media today, hasn’t gone away. If anything, maybe I was early commenting on it. The news came out today that my old employer, Gannett corp, is furloughing workers for one week without pay. See D&C employees to take one week unpaid leave. Once again I find that my decision to leave was the right one – but I’m still worried and unhappy for the good people I left behind. They work hard and try to put out the best product they can. They deserve better.

One of those good people posted an interesting link to a blog post entitled When newspapers are gone, what will you miss? It’s an interesting post. Here’s the money quote: “Newspapers took two cents of journalism and wrapped in ninety-eight cents of overhead and distraction.“

What this is basically saying is that the stuff that makes newspapers most relevant, such as local investigative reporting, is only a small part of the total newspaper package. There’s a lot of money spent on cruft. That sounds like it is probably so. I remember from back in the days when I used to read newspapers that I didn’t read every section. Even the bits I did read I didn’t read every single word. But that’s all part of why I stopped buying papers. Why spend money on 60 pages (or whatever) when I only want 5?

But there’s more to the explanation than that. Despite layoffs, furloughs and various other desperate cost-cutting measures going on, I find it hard to believe that the noble institution that once supported the likes of Edgar Allen Poe, Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain and even Ben Franklin (he got his start as a printer, remember) is going to completely disappear from the Earth.

It’s possible that newspaper conglomerates are on the way out. It may be that the old business model of keeping large stables of writers and editors in order to produce daily content that is mostly of only marginal interest, all in order to sell overpriced ads to a small number of local businesses (all so the CEO can get paid millions while his company is failing) may be on the way out.  That would be the end of a lot of jobs but would it be the end of journalism?

There may be fewer people making a living from journalism. Maybe more of the investigative burden will fall to weekly papers or even tabloids. Is there something about having a multi-million or billion dollar corporate master that makes someone better at those things?

I was going to say, “no when I remembered that that the Treasury Department has been stonewalling Fox News’s Freedom of Information request on how TARP money is being spent (see http://finance.yahoo.com/news/FOX-Business-Network-Sues-the-bw-14033083.html). That kind of legal fight is one area where having deep-pockets backing can be a big help. Maybe I’m an optimist (not something I can remember ever having been accused of) but I believe that the need for other solutions will produce those solutions. Foundations, maybe. Or hackers (“They won’t produce the documents? We’ll get them for you! If it’s on a computer somewhere, it might as well be public!”).

Even granting that particular drawback to the death of big corporate newspapers, I don’t believe that the death of the current shape of the American news industry directly equates to the death of news. It’s a product people want, after all. And there are lots of unemployed (or temporarily furloughed) people out there who have ideas about how to fill that need.

Have some faith. The current phase is hard but it will all work out. I think.

Tags: business

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 14th, 2009 at 4:44 pm and is filed under media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.