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From The Economist print edition (Aug 24th 2006)
The most useful bit of the media is disappearing. A cause for concern,
but not for panic
?A GOOD newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself,? mused
Arthur Miller in 1961. A decade later, two reporters from the
Washington Post wrote a series of articles that brought down President
Nixon and the status of print journalism soared. At their best,
newspapers hold governments and companies to account. They usually set
the news agenda for the rest of the media. But in the rich world
newspapers are now an endangered species. The business of selling
words to readers and selling readers to advertisers, which has
sustained their role in society, is falling apart (see article).
Of all the ?old? media, newspapers have the most to lose from the
internet. Circulation has been falling in America, western Europe,
Latin America, Australia and New Zealand for decades (elsewhere, sales
are rising). But in the past few years the web has hastened the
decline. In his book ?The Vanishing Newspaper?, Philip Meyer
calculates that the first quarter of 2043 will be the moment when
newsprint dies in America as the last exhausted reader tosses aside
the last crumpled edition. That sort of extrapolation would have
produced a harrumph from a Beaverbrook or a Hearst, but even the most
cynical news baron could not dismiss the way that ever more young
people are getting their news online. Britons aged between 15 and 24
say they spend almost 30% less time reading national newspapers once
they start using the web.
Up to a podcast, Lord Copper?
Advertising is following readers out of the door. The rush is almost
unseemly, largely because the internet is a seductive medium that
supposedly matches buyers with sellers and proves to advertisers that
their money is well spent. Classified ads, in particular, are quickly
shifting online. Rupert Murdoch, the Beaverbrook of our age, once
described them as the industry's rivers of gold?but, as he said last
year, ?Sometimes rivers dry up.? In Switzerland and the Netherlands
newspapers have lost half their classified advertising to the internet.
Newspapers have not yet started to shut down in large numbers, but it
is only a matter of time. Over the next few decades half the rich
world's general papers may fold. Jobs are already disappearing.
According to the Newspaper Association of America, the number of
people employed in the industry fell by 18% between 1990 and 2004.
Tumbling shares of listed newspaper firms have prompted fury from
investors. In 2005 a group of shareholders in Knight Ridder, the owner
of several big American dailies, got the firm to sell its papers and
thus end a 114-year history. This year Morgan Stanley, an investment
bank, attacked the New York Times Company, the most august
journalistic institution of all, because its share price had fallen by
nearly half in four years.
Having ignored reality for years, newspapers are at last doing
something. In order to cut costs, they are already spending less on
journalism. Many are also trying to attract younger readers by
shifting the mix of their stories towards entertainment, lifestyle and
subjects that may seem more relevant to people's daily lives than
international affairs and politics are. They are trying to create new
businesses on- and offline. And they are investing in free daily
papers, which do not use up any of their meagre editorial resources on
uncovering political corruption or corporate fraud. So far, this fit
of activity looks unlikely to save many of them. Even if it does, it
bodes ill for the public role of the Fourth Estate.
Getting away with murder
In future, as newspapers fade and change, will politicians therefore
burgle their opponents' offices with impunity, and corporate villains
whoop as they trample over their victims? Journalism schools and
think-tanks, especially in America, are worried about the effect of a
crumbling Fourth Estate. Are today's news organisations ?up to the
task of sustaining the informed citizenry on which democracy depends??
asked a recent report about newspapers from the Carnegie Corporation
of New York, a charitable research foundation.
Nobody should relish the demise of once-great titles. But the decline
of newspapers will not be as harmful to society as some fear.
Democracy, remember, has already survived the huge television-led
decline in circulation since the 1950s. It has survived as readers
have shunned papers and papers have shunned what was in stuffier times
thought of as serious news. And it will surely survive the decline to
come.
That is partly because a few titles that invest in the kind of
investigative stories which often benefit society the most are in a
good position to survive, as long as their owners do a competent job
of adjusting to changing circumstances. Publications like the New York
Times and the Wall Street Journal should be able to put up the price
of their journalism to compensate for advertising revenues lost to the
internet?especially as they cater to a more global readership. As with
many industries, it is those in the middle?neither highbrow, nor
entertainingly populist?that are likeliest to fall by the wayside.
The usefulness of the press goes much wider than investigating abuses
or even spreading general news; it lies in holding governments to
account?trying them in the court of public opinion. The internet has
expanded this court. Anyone looking for information has never been
better equipped. People no longer have to trust a handful of national
papers or, worse, their local city paper. News-aggregation sites such
as Google News draw together sources from around the world. The
website of Britain's Guardian now has nearly half as many readers in
America as it does at home.
In addition, a new force of ?citizen? journalists and bloggers is
itching to hold politicians to account. The web has opened the closed
world of professional editors and reporters to anyone with a keyboard
and an internet connection. Several companies have been chastened by
amateur postings?of flames erupting from Dell's laptops or of cable-TV
repairmen asleep on the sofa. Each blogger is capable of bias and
slander, but, taken as a group, bloggers offer the searcher after
truth boundless material to chew over. Of course, the internet panders
to closed minds; but so has much of the press.
For hard-news reporting?as opposed to comment?the results of net
journalism have admittedly been limited. Most bloggers operate from
their armchairs, not the frontline, and citizen journalists tend to
stick to local matters. But it is still early days. New online models
will spring up as papers retreat. One non-profit group,
NewAssignment.Net, plans to combine the work of amateurs and
professionals to produce investigative stories on the internet. Aptly,
$10,000 of cash for the project has come from Craig Newmark, of
Craigslist, a group of free classified-advertisement websites that has
probably done more than anything to destroy newspapers' income.
In future, argues Carnegie, some high-quality journalism will also be
backed by non-profit organisations. Already, a few respected news
organisations sustain themselves that way?including the Guardian, the
Christian Science Monitor and National Public Radio. An elite group of
serious newspapers available everywhere online, independent journalism
backed by charities, thousands of fired-up bloggers and well-informed
citizen journalists: there is every sign that Arthur Miller's national
conversation will be louder than ever.
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