The Associated Press says a survey of editorial rooms across the country reveals a great deal of pessimism about the future of the industry. This suggests that the news model is dying. But the real question is what will come in the old model’s place? As newspapers begin to fold up, the void will be filled in other ways. In some sense the AP article can be read, not as an obituary, but as a prologue.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Nearly three-quarters of U.S. newspaper executives responding to a recent survey said their ability to inform readers has diminished with their steadily shrinking staffs. The survey conducted by the Associated Press Managing Editors illuminated the doubts and concerns hovering over newspapers as the industry reels from a slump that has been worsening since last fall. …
The comments accompanying the responses were filled with resignation, frustration, anger, despair, confusion and even some gallows humor that reflected the depressed state of the U.S. economy as more people lose their homes because they can’t afford their mortgages.
“Our newspaper’s biggest revenue source today is foreclosure notices,” wrote Clifford Buchan, editor of the Forest Lake Times, a free weekly newspaper in Minnesota. “We have uncertainty once that run ends, as it most surely will.”
To cope with the hard times, 65 percent of the survey respondents said they have laid off workers since January 2008. Nearly 30 percent said they have lowered wages.
This is a moment of opportunity for a new industry to be born. The problem is that nobody has figured out how to do it, yet.
There is a good choice of 19th century quotes to go with the AP piece. Tennyson catches part of the mood.
Then loudly cried the bold Sir Bedivere:
“Ah! my Lord Arthur, whither shall I go?
Where shall I hide my forehead and my eyes?
For now I see the true old times are dead,
When every morning brought a noble chance,
And every chance brought out a noble knight.
Such times have been not since the light that led
The holy Elders with the gift of myrrh.
But now the whole Round Table is dissolv’d
Which was an image of the mighty world,
And I, the last, go forth companionless,
And the days darken round me, and the years,
Among new men, strange faces, other minds.”And slowly answer’d Arthur from the barge:
“The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
And then there’s Matthew Arnold. Darker, but close enough to the mark.
Wandering between two worlds, one dead
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head
Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.
Yet the moment comes.
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22 Comments
1. SpeakEasy:If I read your summation correctly, I agree; The old model is dying and the new model is being forged even as we speak (or type, I believe). Tomorrow morning was when news was reported with the old model. There will be no need to cry “Stop the presses!” with the new model because the presses never stop and are instantaneously updated and sent around the globe in seconds. With the new model we get competition again. With competition we get oversight among peers, not group think, echo chambers. No wordsmithing to obscure truth through nuance. More importantly, it brings more people into contact with real news content without filtration. I welcome the new model. You, Richard, and those of your ilk have brought this about and I thank you for it. Rock those PJ’s brother.
footnote: more evidence of an improved model: the editing comments feature. Less typos, more accurate.
May 14, 2009 - 4:43 pm 2. Talnik:Oh. I thought you meant “The Passing of Arthur Sulzberger .” Jr.
May 14, 2009 - 5:11 pm 3. whiskey:The Arthur stories were of course, just stories, often written to glorify/justify the questionable origins of the Tudors, and later romanticized beyond all reason by various poets and others in the 19th Century.
There probably was a “real” man who for a time, using Roman roads and knowledge of them, stopped the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes cold in their advance through Britain. We have archaelogical evidence of this advance being stopped, suddenly, for about 100 years or so.
He was not Arthur the Myth. Which is a tale told to justify various ends, and itself fascinating but unimportant, a mere icing on the Tudor or 19th Century cake. Not the cake itself.
The new model has already been born. It’s called Drudge Report, which has more daily page views than combined TV watching per day, around 75 million IIRC. There is also the plethora of blogs, forums, and so on that people have put together.
The old model died because it chased away half it’s readership: men, and conservatives, out of ideological and gender purity. Who would have thought that newspapers could wean men from the habit of reading about sports? But enough Olberman types, and they can.
Of course hidden in the weeds is demographic collapse. Sports radio used to be a mainstay in LA. Now there’s just ONE Sports Radio show, and that’s a symptom of not enough Whites to support it (to be fair, there is one in Spanish).
Newspapers would not be collapsing if the new young people were Anglo instead of Mexican, even with alienating men and conservatives. Sometimes SWPL and their fondness for diversity (read: ethnic cleansing of working class Whites and Blacks by Mexicans) are too clever by half.
May 14, 2009 - 5:11 pm 4. Annoy Mouse:I think wordsmithing should be the least of our problems. In the news media we already see a schism of branding wide enough that the pols point out the party allegiance of their sworn enemies, the right by the news agency they work for. Doesn’t say much for the rest of the loyal non-opposition? Already you are an MSNBC, CBS, CNN, or a dreaded Fox Newsie. And like we Belmonters we loath our ideological counter-parts in the land of Kos. Though I think most people are basically lazy and they will take on the stylistics of the beautiful people to do their bidding. Are you a George Clooney or an Opra? Don’t tell me you’re a Sean Penn. We need real heroes right out of the Film Actor Guild. But seriously, style is the thing and the new media will bring that with it. It will be the cool thing and it will only be available on….well that is the question. Howard Stern on satellite, Rush on AM, Wretchard on RSS and Anderson Cooper exclusively on I-Pod?
May 14, 2009 - 5:19 pm 5. Herb:SpeakEasy — alas no better at the spelling, tho’. Firefox checks mine. My remaining need is an erudition checker. I am like so over my depth.
May 14, 2009 - 5:53 pm 6. Marie Claude:In Neederland, the journalists will be paid by the state
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/may/14/dutch-journalists-government-payout
God save the queen of Holland, the news will be “tout va très bien Madame la Marquise…”
May 14, 2009 - 6:07 pm 7. wretchard:Thank you Marie Claude for the link in #6.
May 14, 2009 - 6:10 pm 8. newscaper:Well AFAIC, PJTV isn’t the next wave — Bill WHittle’s takedown of Jon Steweart over truman as war criminal was the first convincing use of the format I’ve seen.
As web video becomes more ubiquitous, I find it more annoying than ever to find that there usually is *not* a transcipt or parallel article. Text is quick and scannable. The video is usually torture.
May 14, 2009 - 6:17 pm 9. donald:check this out: http://spectator.org/archives/2009/02/02/authors-of-their-own-doom.
I grew up with newspapers and still read 3 a day, but this guy is right — they are preachy and boring.
May 14, 2009 - 6:25 pm 10. Robohobo:SpeakEasy @ 1: “With competition we get oversight among peers, not group think, echo chambers.”
I agree totally except for the last statement. See Malkin’s sites, LGF and others that have closed registrations. LGF is one of the worst – Charles bans people for disagreeing with him or his. He has become what he railed against. Malkin, the same. The PJM sites allow open comments.
From Winds of Change, Nortius Maximus proposed 4 types of online entities. It is interesting reading. I and most here fall under ‘upstanding cognomens’.
The world is changing. Like the Instapundit says – Faster, please.
May 14, 2009 - 6:32 pm 11. RAH:The problem with bloggers is that they are parasites performing punditry and not discover the newws.
A better model is that to recruit news from everday people and then colate that into a information article.
May 14, 2009 - 8:11 pm 12. Morton Doodslag:While it’s comforting to imagine that our corrupt media will yield to some b
superior format, I’m not so sure. As media choices have proliferated in the last two decades, it has also narrowed the appeal og its offerings to narrower and narrower groups of readers, viewers, and listeners. Today as perhaps never before people can tune into resources that appeal to their sensibilities, and I’m not sure that’s really a good thing for society in the largest sense. I believe that the scourge of multiculturalism is extremely harmful to our national cohesion, and augers ill for our future. The balkanization of our media is a manifestation of this trend. Perhaps I’m embracing a fantasist notion of a bygone era when media was more narrowly controlled, but seemed to serve the larger society fairly well in its day.
Today there doesn’t seem to be any opportunity to reach consensus, bit what is worse, I doubt that good ideas will have the same chance to be disseminated. Richard, you are brilliant, but how wide is your readership? How wide can it ever become in the entropic chaos of today???
I read the front page of the online NYT and wonder about the sanity of their editors and readersip. Today, for example, they feature a Taliban propaganda piece, complete with harrowing burn pictures. Predictably they use it to defame America’s actions in Afghanistan without question. While it’s comforting to imagine that vile tool of anti-American propaganda going down in flames, I can’t help but wonder with some trepidation about the atomized midget media which will replace it. Our chaotic world appears to be getting a lot more chaotic in the near future. I doubt that many things I value today will survive the onslaught of change, and I surmise that’s part of Richard’s point.
May 14, 2009 - 9:02 pm 13. noprisoners:Morton Doodslag @ 12:
These are excellent points. Who will be the truth-teller? I don’t know.
May 14, 2009 - 9:28 pm 14. Mark:The next half-million Americorps workers will be happy to serve as journalists for $10 per hour. Problem solved.
Morton writes: “Our chaotic world appears to be getting a lot more chaotic in the near future. I doubt that many things I value today will survive the onslaught of change, and I surmise that’s part of Richard’s point.”
Late night thoughts, down the rabbit hole:
One doesn’t want to be overly dramatic about dire straits ahead, but on the other hand questionable, perhaps unsustainable, economic policies don’t give one a lot of reason for optimism.
If I may channel the remarkable Rene Girard for a moment: stumbling blocks (skandalon) exist within every person and within every group, creating unresolved tension. People and nations willy-nilly seek resolution via violent scapegoating. This isn’t something you find in the newspaper. You may find it in psychology, or anthropology, or in the Gospels, but not in a news feed.
Liberals are seething over Pelosi’s bungling of the oh-so-close prosecution of Bush and Cheney, smelling metaphorical blood. Liberals, more generally, see religion (but mainly Christianity) as a (the?) source of intolerable, unresolved societal tension and therefore focus their animosity upon it. Islam envies and fears the west but is largely impotent against it. Traditional Christians labor under some literalist and triumphalist baggage and, also frustrated, cast about for some resolution. Conservatives (I suppose I can speak for myself) aren’t lacking their own virulent, contradictory animosities. Economic prosperity has been an all-purpose social lubricant, but we’ve probably already used up that handy option for resolving our conflicts.
I expect the next handy option, if the economy continues to slide world-wide, will be general victimization of Israel. The need for resolution of civilizational tension is great at this point, and Israel is too tempting a victim to pass up. Pinch seems journalistically ready to hold the coats of the aggressors. (On the other hand, Pakistan may do something to India first, Pakistan being Pakistan, but the same psychological mechanism is at work.)
The powers and principalities will generally agree that it’s expedient for one entity to perish if that will help to resolve (for a time) our unresolveables, and the crowds will accept nothing else. The resolution is an illusion, but the desire is unescapable.
Satan was a murderer from the beginning.
May 14, 2009 - 10:22 pm 15. PA Cat:2 Talnik
If Wretchard was indeed referring to Pinch Sulzberger with his allusion to the Idylls of the King, let us hope it won’t be another case of hic jacet Arthurus, rex quondam, rexque futurus. The thought of Pinch restored to power as a political newspaper czar is depressing, to put it mildly.
May 14, 2009 - 10:53 pm 16. anton:15. PA Cat
Don’t be too suprised if that happens….The One will need a mouthpiece and what better than Pravda reincarnated! Another industry with a TARP bailout (wasn’t that supposed to be used to help the BANKS?) and a controlling Government interest.
Time to dig out my history books and read up on the rise of the Soviets.
May 15, 2009 - 5:53 am 17. LarryD:The MSM is so obviously in Obama’s pocket already, it would be no surprise if he bailed them out.
Of course, that makes the MSM’s role as propaganda arm of the Democrats so obvious no one can miss it. I think that would speed up the readership loss.
May 15, 2009 - 6:57 am 18. buddy larsen:Well, after all, Marx himself said monopoly is the final stage of capitalism.
May 15, 2009 - 7:46 am 19. buddy larsen:The idea of “niche markets” –such as NY Times’ –being ‘distributed intelligence’ and thus anti-monopoly, sounds like reason. But sometimes (as in this case) the niche marketer goes hostile on the medium in which the niche exists. So, you get ‘walled -off’ niches which are less ‘distributed power’ and more simply the different organs inside Leviathan.
May 15, 2009 - 7:53 am 20. buddy larsen:i don’t imagine the NY Times sees itself as a reporter of what Leviathan is doing –i imagine it sees itself as Leviathan’s brain.
May 15, 2009 - 7:57 am 21. Herb:Recent data shows Wall Street Journal circ up double digits. News side seems fair with the occasional swerve but the opinion is capitalist, freedom, and constitution. Not a coincidence I think. Rupert is not the Devil.
But locally the Atlanta Journal recently reduced the physical size of the paper by ~15% while their circ numbers went down 20%. Also dumped about a hundred staff. Its a race between the physical paper and the Cox fortune as to which disappears first. I hold no position on the favorite. Maybe they’ll hire Pinch.
May 15, 2009 - 11:37 am 22. SpeakEasy:#10 Robohobo,
I get your point but I was referring to the authors specifically. Read most comment sections (on blogs obviously) and it is usually filled with deeply entrenched ideology and name calling, BC being one of the exceptions (why I come here often). I appreciate some of the comments but I come here for the author mostly.
May 15, 2009 - 9:04 pmSorry, comments for this entry are closed at this time.