The End of the World As I Know It
I grew up in Atlanta, and learned to read from the pages of the Atlanta Constitution. The left column of the front page was reserved for Ralph McGill, at the time a legend in journalism. He crusaded for political and social justice, for tolerance, and a free society. My goal in life was set by the time I was seven: I wanted to be a journalist, write for the Constitution, and change the world.Well, as fate would have it, I did grow up and become a writer for the Constitution. However, Ralph McGill had died, and his heir, Eugene Patterson, had moved south to make the St. Petersburg Times one of the premier papers in the country despite its small size. The Constitution had been taken over by Cox Enterprises, now one of the major communications monopolies in the nation and even then a souless and gray corporation. If I wanted to change the world, a change in career had to come first.
The submersion of the Atlanta Constitution into insignficance was an early portent of the eventual demise of print media. It has not died yet, but it has entered the end times. The primary culprit for the media at large is the same as it was for the Atlanta papers: the hostile corporate takeover of a free press. News pages are sanitized so as to not offend the sensibilities of Wall Street Boards of Directors. Columns and editorials are written to advance the interests of the elite, and not of the populace. There are brief shining moments, usually in the news pages of the Washington Post and the editorials of the New York Times, but they are becoming few and far between. By and large, the print media has abandoned its essential function of providing independent oversight of the doings of the great and powerful, so as to allow members of the public a chance to have input into outcomes of great concern to the nation.
The world I grew up in barely exists. Like many others, I dreamed of becoming a newspaper reporter the way that others would dream of becoming a cowboy or train engineer. There was romance, tradition, a sense of fighting against the odds, and, as it turned out, there was fatalism as well.
And even though this represents the death of a dream, it was a childhood fantasy after all, and I've put many of these aside without regret. I find that I have few tears for the passing of journalisim as I knew it. It is far too entertaining to watch the emergence of new forms of media. The mind of man (and woman) is an amazing thing, and, like nature, it abhors a vacuum. So instead of print broadsides, we have Internet blogs, talk radio, a renaissance of political books representing all permutations of conservative, moderate and liberal thought, and fake TV that presents more accurate assessments of the world than the "real" network TV does.
It's just the tip of the volcano. The conservative camp has commandeered talk radio, while the liberal intellectuals have discovered the power of the Internet, but each factor is taking note of the other's success, and planning accordingly. There are think tanks on both sides of the aisle, and impassioned (if often uninformed) debate on major issues in virtually every living room. More outlets of expression and news dissemination open up each day.
I had a lot of dreams as a child. Some have come true. Others have fallen by the wayside. Still others have opened up when I thought I had no dreams left, and they have often become the most enduring. Throughout it all, I have learned to embrace the present, and welcome the future, as long as I keep doing everything in my power to keep the dreams of political and social justice, tolerance, and a free society alive also.
posted by Lenore Wilson @ 11:18 PM
2 Comments:
Don't count the papers out yet. Print media still has a role to play. The Internet has a bright future, but I think that for the moment print still has the greatest potential as a defender of the disenfranchised. It's true, there's been a huge shift towards concentrating power in few hands and making content palatable to big money, but as with most changes in society there has been a countermovement - that of bringing journalism back down to the community level, making it about what people need to know rather than what will entertain them - in essence, people researching and reporting their own news. Talk about fighting the odds.
I don't know if there's such a publication where you live, but I've heard of several community newspapers that started as defenders of housing rights in low-income neighborhoods, staffed by residents themselves. The public is those cases responded so well that the publication grew into an organization capable of reporting on all sorts of neighborhood issues. I've also heard of papers starting over issues like microfinance and low-income lending. I don't see this happening in television the same way. I suspect it's because it's much more costly to do small-scale. Aside from the Internet, print is one of the cheapest ways to research, compile, verify, and disseminate information.
Radio is also not as accessible to the public. The Internet may be more accessible, but it's still a Wild West sort of place, governed by no standard of ethics or excellence (I'm not saying it should be, at all - but you do have to take it for what it is.) Both the blogosphere and radio, it seems to me, are more focused on opinion than investigation, and so, as you implied, are still places where the converted preach to the choir. I emphasize this not to deprecate either forum, but to point out that neither can fill print's shoes quite yet.
It's taken a bruising lately, but the print media - minus those publications who clearly flaunt the notion - still has a code, and that heroism you were taken with as a child still lives in certain newsrooms. These days it seems you have to look down rather than up to find it, though - whether it's in education, or agriculture, or social justice, or journalism, small hands seem to be the ones doing the work that furthers the dreams of great societies. Big hands, with some exceptions, can pretty much be counted on to do one thing: line themselves with money.
I always take your comments very seriously, as they are invariably profound and well thought. However, while I believe that small community newsletters may well have value in niche markets, they do not represent the future of the print media. Granted an actual obituary is quite premature, the disease is moving from chronic to terminal.
I'm going to borrow these facts heavily from a friend's knowledge base, rather than searching them out first-hand, so there may be something lost in translation in the argument coming up. I don't doubt that the information my friend gave me wasn't 100% correct, or else I wouldn't base my discussion on it, but I might have some difficulties with recall.
With that caveat, let me explain why the print media is losing ground, beyond the corporate take-over thing.
First, the print media is the slowest of all news outlets. An article posted on the web is heavily read the first day, and not read at all after 1.5 days. By the time the print media picks it up and runs with it, it's news value has already been exhausted.
Second, the penetration of the Internet is stunning, and beyond anything the print media can manage. My friend was telling me of the slashdot effect, which describes what happens when the website slashdot.org (or slashdot.com) links to another website. In the case of a link to an established site like the New York Times, the number of hits rises by about a million beyond normal. In the case of less well-equipped website, a link by slashdot results in the crash of the web site. This is readership that paper and ink cannot begin to approach.
Finally, Internet news sources, including those published by print heavyweights, appeal to the impatient reader. Articles are immediately accessed, without jumping from page to page, and it is simple to select only those topics of interest. You can become as well informed as you like in a matter of moments, rather than hours. Of course, if you are sipping coffee in a coffee shop, a newspaper can be less cumbersome than a laptop. And yet still, I see more people with their laptops open than newspapers spread.
However, I will say I am encouraged by your reports of focused, local newspapers. Perhaps they are also a beacon of change, and of new things to come.
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