For many people, it’s a cut and dry issue – newspapers are dead or slowly dying, because the Internet has destroyed their underlying business models. But a few days ago, David Simon (who some may know as the executive producer of “The Wire”, an incredible show that everyone should see) published a fascinating perspective on what’s actually happened to them entitled Does the news matter to anyone anymore? Most of his account is based on what he experienced as a Baltimore Sun reported from the early 1980s to the mid 1990s, and what he’s seen since then, with a particular focus placed on the role that consolidating monopoly power has played.
There are so many insights and questions that emerge from this piece that they are impossible to list. From a business perspective, it’s worth contemplating whether excess short-term profits were captured at the expense of destroying long-term value. As Simon notes he “did not encounter a sustained period in which anyone endeavored to spend what it would actually cost to make the Baltimore Sun the most essential and deep-thinking and well-written account of life in central Maryland.” Underlying this comment is his notion that what newspapers had to do was up their game in terms of interesting content, while most did the exact opposite.
But the bigger issue here is really on a social level. Discussing the situation that now exists in Baltimore, Simon notes:
So in a city where half the adult black males are unemployed, where the unions have been busted, and crime and poverty have overwhelmed one neighborhood after the next, the daily newspaper no longer maintains a poverty beat or a labor beat. The city courthouse went uncovered for almost a year at one point. The last time a reporter was assigned to monitor a burgeoning prison system, I was a kid working the night desk.
It’s obviously not hard to draw the connection between the failure of this newspaper to cover such seemingly important issues, and (say) the criticism directed towards many media outlets for their failure to ask a few more questions about (say) whether a country should go to war.
Personally, I agree with Simon on many fronts, and the article is well worth reading in its entirety, but there’s one thought that continued to trouble me as contemplated it. While it is easy to place the blame on greedy monopolist newspaper owners for increasingly replacing real investigative journalism with fluff, and it’s possible to then connect this failure with their slow demise (with the Internet acting as an accelerant), one still must consider the very real possibility that they were accurately reading the market demand.
This line of thinking would say stop blaming the owners/ writers, and start blaming the readers, because one would think that if enough of them really wanted and valued in-depth coverage on issues like poverty, the “greedy monopolists” would have had no problem giving it to them. In other words, the problem is not that you’re more likely to get an update on Paris Hilton’s escapades than (say) the Hurricane Katrina relief “effort” when you look to the news, but rather that this is exactly what people want to see.
