The Death of Newspapers, Objectivity, and Cab Cuties
I’ve been reading a lot about the future of newspapers lately, and on my reading/listening list this week were two things I recommend checking out if you’re a journalism nerd:
-First there is this lecture, by Alan Rusbridger, the editor of London’s Guardian newspaper. I heard about the lecture via Sullivan’s blog and enjoyed the droll British take on the future of newspapers as we know them (in a word, bleak). I also enjoyed Rusbridger’s attempt to remember the name of a band currently sweeping Britain. He calls them “Death Cab Cuties.” (You have to listen all the way to the end for this.)
-And then over in Slate, there is this piece by Michael Kinsely suggesting that objectivity may be nearing its end as a journalistic conceit, and that this may be a good thing.
No one seriously doubts anymore that the Internet will fundamentally change the news business. The uncertainty is whether it will only change the method of delivering the product, or whether it will change the nature of the product as well. Will people want, in any form—and will they pay for—a collection of articles, written by professional journalists from a detached and purportedly objective point of view?
And…
Would it be the end of the world if American newspapers abandoned the cult of objectivity? In intellectual fields other than journalism, the notion of an objective reality that words are capable of describing has been going ever more deeply out of fashion for decades. Maybe it doesn’t matter what linguists think. But even within journalism, there are reassuring models of what a post-objective press might look like.
He cites, as a prime example, Rusbridger’s Guardian.
There was a bit in the New Yorker recently about "the death of newspapers". It pointed out that virtually ALL of the loss of circulation suffered by newspapers in the last half-century happened before 1980. There weren't a lot of blogs in 1980.
The loss of circulation in newspapers is nothing compared to the loss of eyeballs for TV network news. It's been masked by the explosion of 24/7 cable news, but the truth about that is that no one is watching. Most cable news shows have audiences of a hundred thousand or so -- fewer than P-I subscribers -- and the P-I isn't national.
What's really happening is a shift from evening papers, which are dying out all over, to morning papers, where circulation is up 60% over the last decade or so. Note the Seattle Times is now predominantly a morning paper, and if they succeed in killing the P-I will no doubt become exclusively so.
Oddly for a business that so many insist is dying, newspapers are generally considered by the corporations that own them to be "cash cows", generating tons of easy profit. If a newspaper is losing money, like the Times claims to be, there's usually an ulterior motive and funny accounting.