Two weeks ago the US Senate began an inquiry into the ‘future of journalism.’ It held hearings at which prominent journalists, publishers and new media entrepreneurs offered various analyses of the precipitous decline of America’s local newspapers. Coverage of the hearings started a lively debate on whether there is still time for legislators to prevent the disappearance of local reporting and civic-minded investigative journalism. In one of the more thoughtful statements to the Senate sub-committee, David Simon, a former Baltimore Sun reporter now better known as creator of the HBO series The Wire, pointed out that popular explanations for the demise of printed news (Craig’s list, free internet content, news aggregators, bloggers) overlooked Wall Street’s role in undermining local news reporting.
As far back as 1995, long before the internet held sway over the delivery of news content, Simon was bought out of his position in the newsroom because the newspaper’s management – bowing to pressure from Wall Street – were anxious to maximize profits. The Sun was profitable, Simon noted, but Wall Street’s schemes to increase these profits at any cost led to the disappearance of almost everything that made the paper relevant to the community it covered. Consequently, “In a city in which half the adult black males are without consistent work, the poverty and social services beat was abandoned. In a town where the unions were imploding and the working class eviscerated, where the bankruptcy of a huge steel manufacturer meant thousands were losing medical benefits and pensions, there was no longer a labour reporter. And though it is one of the most violent cities in America, the Baltimore courthouse went uncovered for more than a year and the declining quality of criminal casework in the state’s attorney’s office went largely ignored.” Simon was sceptical that this void would be filled by “citizen journalists” or bloggers, not for lack of good intentions but because the material needed a full-time, trained journalist who could consider all the angles on a complex story and report it fairly.
Former Washington Post managing editor Steve Coll agreed that “[t]he public interest is not located in the business competition between big well-funded corporations, [but] in the reporting on public matters – on government, on private power, on public institutions, on international affairs, particularly at the local level.” He suggested that local newspapers might be salvaged if they were converted into non-profit institutions that could be maintained with public funding. This idea was vigorously supported by Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland, whose Newspaper Revitalization Act would provide the legislation needed to convert newspapers into registered charities.
Others suggested that unless new media giants like Google could devise a way of sharing ad revenues with publishers who maintained full-time news bureaus, then the system would continue to penalise those who paid reporters for generated stories which ended up being posted as ‘free content’ on the internet. Several speakers acknowledged the difficulty of the government or corporations rescuing an industry that functions best when it is independent and critical of both. Beneath a lot of their analysis was an unstated assumption that the infotainment-driven culture which garners most of the profits is fundamentally at odds with the media’s vicarious scepticism of public institutions. Investigative reporting on education policy, zoning boards, office politics at City Hall – all vital stories for any community that wishes to know more about itself – is rarely ‘sexy’ enough to justify itself on a balance sheet, and almost impossible to defend when a newspaper’s financial future is on the line.
Ironically, just as the US Senate was pondering the grim future of traditional newspapers, Britain’s Daily Telegraph was rolling out one of the greatest scoops in its history. Having secured a leak about accounting irregularities in tax claims submitted by more than 180 MPs, the Telegraph has milked the story for all that it is worth. Its circulation has risen by more than 50,000 per day and the ensuing outrage has placed what used to be a relatively marginal newspaper centre-stage in British political commentary. A further irony is that the Telegraph’s disclosures were only possible because of a freedom of information request made by a private citizen writing a book on the value of transparency in public life. The Telegraph’s success shows that there is still a large market for local news, even though the paper’s revelations were not the outcome of patient investigative journalism but rather the purchase of leaked information.
In one of the few upbeat submissions to the Senate committee, Arianna Huffington founder of the Huffington Post, one of the most profitable blogs on the internet, said she believed we live in “Golden Age for news consumers.” Instead of condescending to the general public, and talking high-mindedly about the need to save themselves, she thought newspapers would do better if they learned how to adapt to a “link-based economy.” Huffington also made the telling point that the mainstream media had done a poor job of reporting both the run-up to the Iraq war and the ongoing financial crisis leaving the reading public with “too many autopsies and not enough biopsies.” Even so, Huffington argued that “[t]here is something in our collective DNA that makes us want to sip our coffee, turn a page, look up from a story, say, ‘Can you believe this?’ and pass the paper to the person across the table.” In Huffington’s view, journalism which answers that curiosity and refuses to accept counsels of despair about ‘disruptive technologies’ and the death of print, will always have a future. Let’s hope so.
