It almost seems indecent, at this point, to catalogue the death rattle of newspapers. Not a week goes by without the obituary of yet another once-esteemed daily newspaper, especially in the United States. Interest in this subject is becoming morbid.
There can be little doubt that the Jacobins of journalism have the upper hand. The blog posts of Jeff Jarvis are becoming increasingly strident, even triumphant, as newspapers collapse under the weight of their own arrogance. Jarvis, whose analysis is already post-newspaper, has on his side billionaire Warren Buffet, who said he wouldn’t buy newspapers “at any price”.
Added to these voices of doom we now have Howard Kurtz, a respected media critic who writes for the Washington Post and is perhaps better-known for his CNN show on the media, “Reliable Sources”. In his column today, Kurtz confesses, more out of sorrow than anger, that he’s come to the conclusion that newspapers are toast. As once-proud newspapers like the Boston Globe teeter on the brink of extinction, says Kurtz, he has reluctantly joined the ranks of the pessimists.
“The last few weeks have shaken my belief,” he writes, “suggesting that what I find indispensable — a daily compendium delivered to your doorstep — may be left behind by history and public indifference.”
Kurtz adds: “Newspapers are probably dying as a mass medium, except perhaps for elite or specialized audiences. Cutting down forests, printing the product and trucking it across the region no longer make economic sense. What is lost is the sense of community when everyone read the daily rag.”
I once hosted a television show on the media, and later ran a national daily newspaper which was then, as now, hemorrhaging red ink. I’ve never indulged in excessive nostalgia about the media business since moving on, but this indeed would be a fascinating time to host a television show on the media. I’ll be tuning into CNN International (from home in Paris) in coming weeks and months to follow the debate on “Reliable Sources”.
Meanwhile, another voice has jumped into the fray. Jason Pontin, editor-in-chief and publisher of MIT’s Technology Review, has published a counter-thesis argument under the ambitious title, “How to Save Media”. Pontin takes gentle swipes at some of the articulate voices among the Jacobins, notably Clay Shirky, whose “fashionable wisdom” about the death of newspapers Pontin rejects. On the oft-posed issue of what can replace newspapers, Shirky has asserted: “People committed to saving newspapers [are] demanding to know, ‘If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?’ To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the Internet just broke.”
Pontin has less time for Dave Winer, whom he dismisses as a “grumpy California software programmer”. Winer, known for developing the RSS Web-feed format, once wrote: “Fifteen years ago I was unhappy with the way journalism was practised in the tech industry, so I took matters into my own hands. And then dozens of people did, and then hundreds followed, and now we get much better information about tech. It will happen everywhere, in politics, education, the military, health, science, you name it. The sources will fill in where we used to need journalists. … Everyone is now a journalist.”
Shirky and Winer, argues Pontin, know nothing about the media business as practitioners, and consequently their radical visions are little more than “folly and ignorance”.
It would be inaccurate, indeed churlish, to characterize Pontin’s views as the voice of reaction. But he certainly belongs to what can be described as the cautiously conservative camp – let’s call them Girondins — that opposes what it sees as the vices of revolutionary excess.
Pontin makes some valid points that reveal his own disenchantment with how journalism organizations have been managed in the past. I am in a position to confirm his assertion that journalists traditionally have been “encouraged to cultivate a mild contempt for readers”. I also agree with his prescription that newspaper organizations must get smaller – and fast.
Pontin, as his title boldly announces, has a plan. Readers should consult his article for details. I had the impression that he’s less optimistic about the future than he claims. He concludes, for example, with the following prediction: “Things change or die, including once-cherished organizations. Today’s newspapers and magazines will be transformed or replaced by other publications, which will have new forms and modes of business. There will be a great and terrible clearing: scores of newspapers and magazines will vanish; those that survive will be much reduced; and most people employed as journalists or media professionals today will have different jobs in five years.”
I shouldn’t be surprised, I suppose, because the Jacobins and Girondins were, in the final analysis, simply different movements within the same revolutionary cause. And if one thing is certain, these are revolutionary times in the business of journalism.
