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This Just In…
The coming convergence of newspapers and blogs?
March 26, 2008
America is about to enter a fractured, chaotic era of news, characterized by the superior community conversations made possible by blogs, and also by a steep drop in first-rate journalism. As a piece in the current issue of The New Yorker points out, the result will be clusters of communities with their own ideas of “news” and “truths,” and the loss of a single national narrative and agreed-upon sets of facts by which to conduct our policies.
Newspapers, which once helped define the meaning of America to its citizens, are dying, the magazine writes — in terms of their numbers, economic vitality, editorial quality, depth and personnel. Until recently, owning the dominant newspaper in a mid-sized American city was like having a license to print money. Now, few people believe that newspapers in their current print form will survive. In the Internet age, no one has figured out how to rescue newspapers. Web sites run by newspaper companies are not nearly enough to replace the revenue lost from declining circulations and print ads, Eric Alterman writes. The newspaper industry has reacted to the collapse of its business model with a spiral of budget cuts, bureau closings, buyouts, layoffs, and reductions in page sizes and column inches. The average age of the American newspaper reader is 55 and rising. It might seem an ironic injustice, then, that when a young reader surfs the Web in search of political news, he often ends up at a site that merely aggregates journalism that originated in newspapers — a fact not likely to save any newspaper jobs or increase papers’ stock valuations. At the same time, public trust in newspapers continues to slip. Vastly more Americans believe in flying saucers and Sept. 11 conspiracy theories than believe the mainstream news media is balanced or objective, Alterman writes.
As Rupert Murdoch warned the newspaper industry’s top editors and publishers in April 2005, the days when “news and information were tightly controlled by a few editors, who deigned to tell us what we could and should know” are over. Today’s consumers “want news on demand, continuously updated. They want a point of view….”
On the Huffington Post, the Web site launched one month after Murdoch’s speech as a liberal alternative to the Drudge Report, news is not something handed down from above, but “a shared enterprise between its producer and its consumer,” The New Yorker quotes Jonah Peretti, one of founder Arianna Huffington’s early collaborators, as saying. With its immediate understanding of which stories interest readers and provoke online comments, an Internet-based news site is “alive in a way that is impossible for paper and ink,” he says.
The Huffington Post is poised to break even on advertising revenue, but it has a tiny news staff, most of its stories originate elsewhere, and “many of the original blog posts that it publishes do not merit the effort of even a mouse click,” the magazine writes. User-generated content is all the rage, “but most of it totally sucks,” Peretti admits.
Still, the birth of the blogosphere, which can bypass big media institutions and inspire conversations within like-minded online communities, might represent a revival of genuinely democratic discourse. Needing only a computer and a decent Internet connection, we can all join a debate on presidents, policies and proposals.
For her part, Arianna Huffington believes that the online and print newspaper models are beginning to converge. “As advertising dollars continue to move online,” the New Yorker quotes her as saying, “…HuffPost will be adding more and more reporting and the [New York] Times and [Washington] Post model will continue with the kinds of reporting they do, but they’ll do more of it originally online.” — Compiled by Greg Beaubien for Tactics and The Strategist Online
Comments
Mark Forstneger says:
It would be nice to see PRSA.org embrace and promote the technological innovations sweeping the lives of its members. The association still has a way to go until it emerges from its turn-of-the-century online approach.
Grant says:
You miss the fact that these so-called conversations seldom are based on productive, meaningful discourse.
Mark Forstneger says:
I'm sorry to hear that's been your experience, Grant. It hasn't been mine.
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