Ad Newseum

By Ankush

I don't mean to needlessly prolong this discussion about the state of newspapers, but, from my perspective at least, just a few more points are in order -- which, lazily, I'll present in bullet-form.

• Everyone agrees that specialization -- for smaller papers, localization -- is the best way for newspapers to thrive. We shouldn't obscure this agreement or suggest that the point is new. It's something of a cliche, in fact.

• Ezra rightly observes that, whatever people may say, it's not clear that folks in the media are prepared to see their outlets dramatically change. I agree, but I think many of them will see that change is the only option and will try to adjust accordingly. Bob Kuttner's punishingly long piece about newspapers and the internet demonstrates that this can happen.

• It is, in fact, possible to overstate the impact of the internet.  For one, media technologies rarely die.  As Jack Shafer has observed, "New media technologies almost never replace old media technologies, they merely force old technologies to adapt and find new ways to connect with their audiences."

• Relatedly on the point of overstating the internet's impact, I see folks suggesting there's a tremendous redundancy in national news reporting. Ezra writes that "The Tallahassee Reporter [ed.: the what?] can't compete with The New York Times at news gathering.  And until now, they haven't really had to."  Matthew Yglesias writes that "the world doesn't need nearly as much duplication of the basic national news function" and asks, "Why should your local paper be good at covering local news, and be good at covering national news [... etc.]?" In fact, most smaller and mid-size newspapers outsource pretty much all of their national news coverage to wire services and other syndicates. (See here, for just one example.) These papers left the national game quite a while back, so I don't think we should suggest that the internet is rendering obsolete a function that many of these papers gave up on before the internet was their biggest concern.

• Likewise, a ton of cultural coverage is done through the use of syndicates.  Until his illness, Roger Ebert was probably the most widely read film critic in the country.  It's not really the case, as Yglesias writes, that papers are "trying to be good at everything simultaneously."

• The use of sports coverage here is curious. On the whole, sports fans are notoriously devoted to their local writers. It's probably one of the areas of the local paper (whether it exists in print or exclusively on the web) that's least likely to go anywhere.

• I'm also not sure that local journalism is quite as devalued as we all might think. It's worth noting that, for those of us who live in D.C. or New York, our perceptions of what people think about local reporting gigs is dramatically skewed by the fact that we're surrounded by the writers who most think like that -- the people who don't want to work in the smaller media markets and the people who wanted to work out of them. Likewise, people reading blogs like this tend to be more national news-oriented, but I suspect the average reader really does value local journalism (perhaps more so than national reporting), and I think most local journalists like what they do and aren't aspiring to be the next Wolf Blitzer.

• Finally, for anyone who's wondering how it could be true both that there's all this handwringing about the state of small and mid-size newspapers and, as I claim, that a lot of the supposed redundancies in these papers hasn't really existed for quite a while, it's worth trying to venture into the actual economics of what's going on here, which tends to get neglected in these sorts of discussions. So far, one of the worst things -- perhaps the worst thing -- about the internet for smaller newspapers hasn't been the availability of alternative sources of news. It's been Craigslist and all the other sites that are displacing classified ads, job listings, car ads, and so forth in these papers, which previously provided a very large chunk of their revenues.