Views of the News: Jefferson, Thoreau and Liebling

I gave a talk today about the future of newspapers and journalism. I introduced it with three quotations. Taken as a whole, they are rife with contradictions and questions.

Start with two questions: Can the role of newspapers as described below by Jefferson, be filled by the “New Media” of the Internet? Or are the young demonstrators in Iran proving that New Media are far more potent in checking government abuse than newspapers have ever been?

The basis of our government’s being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. — Thomas Jefferson, letter to Edward Carrington, 1787.

Are the news media superficial? Or does the vastness of Internet allow us to “soar above or dive below” the thinness of “Old media” as described by Thoreau?

I have no time to read newspapers. If you chance to live and move and have your being in that thin stratum in which the events which make the news transpire — thinner than the paper on which it is printed —then these things will fill the world for you; but if you soar above or dive below that plane, you cannot remember nor be reminded of them. Henry David Thoreau, 1853

Finally, what is the news? Does it rely on “news media”? For many, the real news might be that they have been sleepwalking through life. The real news awakens them. That is what Thoreau was telling us when he famously wrote in “Walden”: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

We need to find, and make, our own news. We are our own news medium.

Which brings us to Liebling, author of “The Wayward Press.”

“People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news.” A.J. Liebling 1904-1963

As you can imagine, the words of Jefferson, Thoreau and Liebling gave us a few things to talk about. . . .

Newspapers: Turning off the lights

We are about to find out what newspapers are worth.

Beyond their monetary worth as measured by plummeting stock prices of newspaper chains, we are starting to see other evidence of value dribble in as the papers spiral downward.

Two examples:

Today I met with some local Hillsdale business folks who are struggling to market our small commercial center in these hard times. They took a survey of fellow business owners asking about the community, “What brings us together and excites us?”

Nowhere on the list of responses was our community newspaper.

And yet the focus of the marketing effort is designing a full-page ad to be put in — you guessed it — the community newspaper.

I pointed out the irony: without the newspaper, the ad would be worthless. They heard me, but I’m not sure they got the full import of what I was saying.

It's as if I had said, “You know, without air, we’ll all die.” So what else is new?

Well, wait until there are no newspapers and you try to place your ad.

Second example. Up in Longview at The Daily News, the cost-cutting publisher decided to save money by laying off Cathy Zimmerman..

Cathy had been at The Daily News nearly 25 years and just happened to be one of best feature writers and columnists in the Northwest. She has the awards and reader following to prove it.

Oh, and she edited an award-winning features section.

Now her voice has been silenced.

There’s more to the story — most of it about the clueless, disengaged publisher, who was foisted on the paper by corporate owner, Lee newspapers, based in nearby Davenport, Iowa.

The publisher is so isolated from readers, journalism and common courtesy that she didn’t even give Cathy the chance to write a farewell column. Moreover, the paper has written not one word about Cathy’s departure. The editorial page has published not a single letter of protest — and there have been dozens submitted as readers have learned why Cathy's work has vanished from the pages.

Oh, and no one in the newsroom is to mention Cathy’s departure. It’s as if it, and her career, never happened.

As word has spread, some folks — perhaps hundreds — have called in to cancel subscriptions. So much for cost savings. And the cancellations, which prompted an emergency meeting of the circulation department, are another unreported story.

Sadly, these reader revolts don’t usually last. Nor are they well organized. This one needs a list of demands, including the firing of the publisher (a real cost savings) and control from Longview, not Des Moines.

Experience with reader boycotts has shown that, with time, most readers come back. In today's climate there will be newspapers readers until inevitable end. The morbid few will stick around just to witness history in the making — or is it unmaking?

The publisher, no doubt, will remain to turn off the lights.

Will Longviw and surrounding Cowlitz County suffer?

How will anyone know? Will anyone care to know? How will we know whether they care?

Maybe someone will write the answers on the Internet. Maybe.

Questioning a Question

“If newspapers die, can democracy survive?”

That was the question the City of Portland put to three journalists on a panel at the club forum Friday. The Governor Hotel ballroom was packed with those eager to hear the answer.

The question was utterly bogus — a blatant tease.

Newspapers as we know them are dying, no “if” about it.

The good news is that journalism is more alive than ever. It’s just taking a different form. You just have to search around a bit to find reporting you can trust.

And sometimes, it results from your own legwork.

If you have the time and desire, you can search for information and report for yourself. It's kind of fun. Let ten million journalists bloom! In the Internet age, Reporting 101 (in academia it’s called “information literacy”) should be required for all high school seniors.

As for the survival of democracy, it was struggling in this country long before Craig’s List and the Internet pulled the financial rug out from under traditional newspapers.

If democracy is so dependent on newspapers, why have newspapers done such a miserable job of exposing the flaws in our democratic system? Everything from big money influence, to our archaic Electoral College, to inane political commercials, to politicized election officials, to hanging chads, to rigged computers, to sound-bite campaigns.

That said, the strongest newspapers will thrive as journalistic institutions on-line. They will be even greater influences than they are in ink on paper. More people will read them on-line. They will still drive the “public awareness” agenda. And the public will enter the discussion and contribute to the reporting.

And as The Oregonian’s Executive Editor Peter Bhatia pointed out Friday, once on-line, the on-line remnants of lesser newspapers will focus on the local and the hyper-local, i.e. Neighborhoods. Once again, calling all citizen reporters!

Finally, the financial structure of the newspaper industry (and American media in general) has always been suspect. Have you ever wondered why the real estate and auto sections of The Oregonian are produced by the advertising department? Or had you noticed?

Once upon a time, independent journalists actually wrote unvarnished critical stories about houses and cars. They happen to be the two most expensive purchases you will make.

No longer. Why? Take a look at the pipers calling the tunes. (Significantly, product reviews are everywhere on the web.)

Why did it take so long for government and the media to catch on to the financial mess we were in? Ever see any credit card ads in the newspaper? Corollary: Do banks contribute to political campaigns?

Why does the Lehrer News Hour not go after the oil industry? Look who sponsors the program.

No, it’s time to push the pause button on the media and take a long, hard look at them and how they are paid for. Study up. Read about press barons and media conglomerates. Check out the role of advertising in our mediated Culture of Debt and Consumption.

“If newspapers die, can democracy survive?”

We might as well ask, “If cows fly, will we invade Sweden?”

Going with what we had

My journalism class (Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Class of ’69) is approaching its 40th reunion at the end of this month. The e-mail traffic has been frenzied in preparation.

It’s good reading with this group, which, as you might expect, knows how to turn a phrase.

Several have recalled that eons ago in the school’s writing classes, we were reminded, as deadlines loomed, “to go with what you’ve got” — for better or worse.

Back then it usually was worse, but never mind.

Forty years on, my classmates are ordering sweatshirts that read: “We went with what we had.”

I won’t bore you with specifics, but what we “had” since graduation was pretty darn good.

That said, 40 years ago none of us imagined that our own retirements would be accompanied by the retirements of newspapers themselves.

All of which led one wag to suggest that the words on the sweatshirts should read:

"What we had — went."

"Advancing" to newspaper extinction

Time magazine is listing The Cleveland Plain Dealer as one of ten newspapers likely to fold in the next few months.

Some on the list, like the San Francisco Chronicle, could fold in a matter of days.

The Portland angle is that the Cleveland Plain Dealer is owned by Advance Publications, which owns The Oregonian. The same corporate pressures that are driving the Plain Dealer to extinction are at work on Portland's metro.

The only good news, if you can call it that, is that Cleveland is in worse economic shape than Portland.

The Time story is further evidence of the need consider what journalism is becoming, or should become, in the digital age.

What if there were no newspapers?

The textbook I use in my Mass Media and Society class poses a compelling question:

What if there were no newspapers?

That’s no idle question. Newspapers as we have known them are fast disappearing.

Part of the answer to the question depends on what, if anything, we replace newspapers with.

Among the candidates are television, the internet, on-line newspapers and — nothing.

The question also asks us to consider what we value about newspapers. And it must be considered along with its companion: What don’t we value about newspapers?

My gut reaction is that if there were no newspapers we might gain the opportunity to re-assess what is important to us. We’d find out even more if we asked the question: What if there were no mass media at all?

In 1853, newspapers were the sum total of mass media, and in that year Thoreau famously had this to say about them:

“I have no time to read newspapers. If you chance to live and move and have your being in that thin stratum in which the events which make the news transpire — thinner than the paper on which it is printed — then these things will fill the world for you; but if you soar above or dive below that plane, you cannot remember nor be reminded of them.”

So, what if there were no newspapers, no mass media? More of us might “soar above or dive below” their passing, flimsy content.

There’s another approach besides “having no time” for news trivia and media intrusion: Do something about content. Here is where the internet is a solution. We can turn to its vast trove of knowledge at times of our own choosing. We are not tethered to a pandering, insatiable, time-bound, news-cycled, (and recycled) mass media.

Thoreau himself had access to a compendium of knowledge and insight that served his “soaring” needs. It is still available to us today: Books.

Thoreau’s own books have inspired “soaring” for more than 150 years.

Books, traditionally housed in brick-and-mortar libraries, are increasingly found on-line. And much of their content is free.

What if there were no newspapers? We might begin to free ourselves of the “daily news” and seek greater and deeper meaning and understanding in the fullness of time within ourselves and elsewhere.

We might realize that the sources have surrounded us, just waiting to be called upon: teachers, parents, friends, neighbors, authors, sages, children, Nature.

Why have we not paid attention? Where have we been? How did we become so distracted?

What if there were no newspapers?

Newspapers as "hard copy"

The newspaper lexicon is changing as print struggles to survive — in some form or other.

The Portland Tribune is now calling itself a "daily newspaper” even though the daily edition is entirely on-line.

Paper has nothing to do with The Tribune as a "daily newspaper.” And if more editorial staffers are cut, neither will news.

What was once called its newspaper, printed on real paper, is now called “hard copy” and appears only on Thursdays. Free in green distribution boxes, such a publication was referred to as a "free-distribution" weekly newspaper.

“Hard copy,” on the other hand, was what came out of reporters' typewriters when they finished writing. The reporters gave it to a “copy boy” who would take it to the "copy desk," and eventually a “copy editor.” It never got to the street as “copy.”

With the arrival of the computer, "hard copy" was a print-out of what was on the screen. Often mistakes that eluded writers and editors on the screen, jumped out at them on hard copy. They still do.

Now, courtesy of the Tribune, we all can read “hard copy,” presumably without mistakes. Tribune “hard copy” is available at in those ubiquitous “Hard Copy” boxes.

But I doubt that the boxes will be around much longer. I give them and "hard copy" five years — tops.

Another news media turning point

Here's further evidence of the shift from old media to new media.

Yesterday's New York Times carried a story about a Boston community newspaper that has begun running blog items in print.

Until now, newspapers ("old media") were considered the legitimate news source that provided content for "new media" web sites to disseminate.

With the Boston development, news now originating on-line is being legitimized by dissemination through print, the "old media."

The reversing trend is certain to continue until the newspaper-reading public fully migrates to on-line information.

Some of the reason for the reverse flow of information is found in the observations of John Wilpers, the editor-in-chief of BostonNow, the free-distribution daily that is printing the blogs. He says, in the words of the Times' article, that in publishing the blogs he is addressing "the news industry's biggest problem: an inability to connect with the communities it covers."

That's worth rereading...a newspaper with an "inability to connect with the communities it covers." How, one might ask, does a newspaper cover a community it doesn't connect with?

In the new digital age, the "inability" is the direct result of falling newspaper revenues leading to newsroom cuts. So newspapers are turning to free, on-line (and amateur) reporting.

In return, the news bloggers get additional exposure for their sites and keep the rights to their material. According to the Times story, they also get press credentials (or legitimacy through access to sources) and advice on how to increase traffic to their sites.

In the short run, the papers' principal obligation is maintaining quality control and the integrity of what they print.

In the long run, this latest development is simply a stopgap until the screen technology matches the portability and former profitability of newspapers and drives "old media" out of business.

At the rate newspapers are losing readers and revenue, "the long run" should be no longer than five years.