The Rocky Mountain News, a newspaper in Denver since before
there really was a Denver, went out of business at the end
February.
The Rocky Mountain News, a newspaper in Denver since before there really was a Denver, went out of business at the end February. In addition, the Hearst Corp. has drawn a line in the sand with the San Francisco Chronicle and up in Seattle with the Post-Intelligencer: cut expenses in half or shut down the newspapers. Fewer days of printed newspapers or no home delivery in markets from Gilroy to Detroit to Madison, Wisc., and scores of other cutbacks are occurring throughout the country. I’m not telling you anything new in saying these are tough economic times for the newspaper industry or for the economy in general, but the paradigm shift in newspapers has been dramatic and swift.
The reasons for the change are well documented. Classified ads are moving to free Internet sites. Why go for the “five lines, five days, five dollars” pitches, when you can write an encyclopedic ad and post it on Craigslist for nothing? Combine that with a reduction in display ads – there are fewer department stores these days – as well as downturns in auto sales and housing, and the revenue is simply sucked out of the newspaper business. Add changing lifestyles to the mix – most of us are online all day at work and at home – and the information in the newspaper is on the paper’s Web site. Why spend 75 cents, when you can click over for nothing?
While I never earned a living in the newspaper industry, I spent 25 years in journalism in television and seeing any news outlet shut its doors is like a death in the family. It’s sad and bad. Sad, because hundreds, if not thousands of people are now out of work. Their lives are disrupted. New opportunities in the same community are non-existent, so more houses go on the market, kids get yanked out of schools and merchants in the journalist’s hometowns now have at least one former customer. Bad, because the community loses a voice and large pair of eyes and ears.
But, there are many who rejoice in what’s happening. Looking at some of the comments posted on Web sites with stories about newspaper shutdowns or cutbacks, you see everything from “good riddance,” or claims that failures were caused by an outlook that was either too liberal or too conservative. There are some comments about the sadness or the void created by the death of a newspaper, but those who take pleasure in dancing on others’ graves wildly outnumber them.
I’ve been online for almost 30 years now and in many cases was the first adopter in the places I have worked. I’m no Luddite, nor do I believe that newspaper companies are without fault for the predicament they find themselves in. And, truth be told, newspaper sites regardless of where you live, are the most popular places visited on the web.
The credo in the Internet world is simple, “content is king.” Newspapers provide a ton of content each and every day on the Internet. Aggregator sites like Google and Yahoo would have large holes and less content without newspapers. Even commentary sites ranging from Drudge on down pull a lot of their “news” from newspaper sites. So, regardless of your political outlook or the sharpness of your tongue, without the content from newspapers, you would have little to work from.
More importantly is that content from newspapers comes with a higher degree of trust. Reporters are trained in their craft. They learn how to gather facts and present them with coherence and context. That’s something valuable, whether you like the facts or not.
David Cohen, a member of the editorial board of the Morgan Hill Times, is a corporate speech writer in Silicon Valley.
