So here we are. The last column. I’ve been dreaming about this Tuesday for a long time.
But here I am, staring at the last issue of this newspaper I will ever edit, and I feel like I’m looking at something as endangered as the Galapagos’ Lonesome George, the last giant tortoise of his species (who, by the way, finally got it on last summer with two females of a similar species after over 30 years of sexual disinterest).
Like Lonesome George, newspapers are quite seriously on the verge of extinction. Unlike George, however, there is no team of conservationists working to pass the journalistic DNA on to the next generation.
There are about 50,000 newspaper journalists in the country, according to an April 6 article in the Nation, and newspapers laid off almost 16,000 people in 2008. Huge city newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune and the Philadelphia Inquirer have declared bankruptcy. Even The New York Times is on life support, which came in the form of a $250 million loan from Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helú.
People outside of the field will tell you that journalism isn’t actually dying; it’s just moving online, where there is a plethora of online news sources and blogs. Some are rather nonchalant about the fact that, within the decade or sooner, there could be nothing in between the paper that covers your son’s soccer game and The New York Times.
What these people don’t realize is that, despite the apparent boom of information on the Internet, journalism is narrowing by the day. With every reporter laid off, that means one less person attending press conferences and town councils; it is one less person interviewing politicians, witnesses, judges and victims. According to The Washington Post, the number of foreign correspondents employed by newspapers nationwide shrank from 188 to 141 between 2002 and 2006, meaning that there are increasingly fewer American journalists on the ground in Baghdad and Gaza.
As their newsrooms shrink, newspapers (both the print and online versions) are relying more and more on wire services, so that papers across the country are printing cloned stories. With every newspaper at the local or city or regional level that goes under, the more likely it is that the news sources those hundreds or thousands of readers turn to will have less to do with them.
The blogosphere is no replacement for the institutionalized newsroom. Implying that it is indicates a deep misunderstanding of the craft of journalism, which is based on the pursuit of truth through the seeking out of multiple viewpoints, extensive fact checking, the elimination of bias and multiple rounds of editing. The gradual disassembly of newsrooms across the country means the atrophy of the journalistic processes that create the important difference between news articles and blogs.
The situation is serious, and it must be sooner rather than later that we realize that journalism is not something we can just regretfully watch waste away. It’s time to get out the defibrillator.
However, before shocking journalism back to life, we have to figure out how we got ourselves into this newspaper graveyard. Contrary to popular belief, journalism was headed south before the Internet and long before the current economic crisis. The real culprits are corporate ownership and consolidation, which filtered the cacophony of voices into a single-pitch drone and made profits, instead of quality journalism, the bottom line.
Hard-line capitalists might say that the journalism industry is just delivering the consumers of journalism what they want. However, I have a hard time believing that streamlined, often misleading scoop reporting (such as that on the non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq) is really what consumers want, even if that is what they’re paying for.
Either way, journalism is more than an industry. It should be considered the fourth branch of government – an integral part of the checks and balances system upon which our democratic government is founded. Giving up on journalism would mean giving up on our form of government; it would mean giving up on the American people’s desire and right to have access to a free press.
If we learn anything from our current journalistic predicament, it should be that a free press does not organically arise out of a free market. Just as Starbucks runs the neighborhood coffee shops out of business and puts out millions of identical iced coffees, the consolidation of newspapers creates a monotone of coverage where there once was a musical variety.
What is the alternative to the business model for newspapers? Bear with me for a moment as I go back to that microscopic of publications, The Bates Student:
Many college newspapers boast of their “independence” – the year they broke from reliance to self-sufficiency and have since covered all of their printing expenses with advertising and subscription revenue. The Bates Student has been dependent since 1873.
Since our newspaper is distributed free around campus and we are unable to attract enough advertising to stay afloat otherwise, our budget comes as a fixed slice of the student activities fund controlled by the administration. People often ask me whether we are under pressure from the administration to cover or not cover certain stories. The answer is a resounding no.
The fact that the administration financially enables a publication that often criticizes them is, I think, necessary on two levels. It’s necessary to The Bates Student because if our newspaper had even one puppet string attached to it, it wouldn’t be a newspaper. However, it’s also necessary in that, without this non-intervention policy in terms of our newspaper, Bates would not be an institution based on democratic ideals.
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