January 28, 2006
The devolution of the newspaper
Jack Schafer has a good bit on the growing devolution and disillusion of the newspaper under the growing threat of technology. First it was electric typesetting that cashiered the old manual typesetters' unions. Then it was the personal computer enabling anyone who wanted to to lay out a professional quality publication. Now it's the internet, enabling anyone who wants to to reach an arbitrarily large number of people for very little.
I believe, unfortunately, that his solutions are precluded by the very problems he identifies:
"But what a lot of [newspaper] guild members miss is that not everybody wants to read John F. Burns, not everybody who wants to read about Baghdad is going to demand coverage of the quality he produces, and not everybody wants Baghdad coverage, period."
Which is why publications like the Atlantic, my current favorite, have about 150,000 subscribers instead of millions. There's room for two or three publications of that genre, quality, and scale in this country, but no more, because there just isn't a market for it.
This, I believe, is what Mr. Schafer has failed to recongize: it isn't just advances in technology that have lowered the entry fee to journalism to the point that anyone can play who wants to. It's also that there's been a significant reduction in demand for the product which journalists produce. No one - relatively speaking - wants high-quality, in-depth, well-reasoned, logical, cultural and political commentary. As long as the sports and celebrity pages are up to date, the rest can pretty much go hang.
For for the few hundred thousand people who actually want something that approximates what a newspaper actually does, there will continue to be publications to meet their demands. But the archaic, large-scale journalist-as-a-class is rapidly becoming obsolete. USA Today is little more than a glorified gossip column that happens to run an AP feed. There isn't enough demand to support more than a few dozen honest-to-goodness essayists.
