THE PLUNDERING OF PRINT MEDIA

In my younger days as a reporter at the Dispatch, it always irked me that articles which took me (and my colleagues) hours or days or even weeks to bring forth could so casually be cannibalized without credit by our local TV anchors. 

When I saw one of the TV trucks pull up in front of the newspaper each afternoon to snatch up the latest edition from the box outside of 34 S. Third St., I wished somebody would take a picture of this journalistic larceny so that people could see where those well-coiffed talking heads really got their news.

Of course, that never happened because the owners of the Dispatch also owned (among other things) one of the local TV stations most guilty of such theft.

Which brings me to today's lead editorial in yesterday's Dispatch, Best Source, which cites research refuting the notion that newspapers can easily be replaced by blogs, Twitter and other "social media tools" on the Internet. 

"Looking at the Baltimore news market and tracking six big stories during a week in July 2009, Pew found that 61 percent of the original reporting on those stories was done by newspapers and their Web sites. Local TV stations and their Web sites did most other original reporting, at 28 percent.

Radio stations and their sites contributed only 7 percent of new content, and Internet-only outlets did only 4 percent," the editorial states.

http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/editorials/stories/2010/01/19/paperz.ART_ART_01-19-10_A10_V9GBE5P.html?sid=101

The argument certainly is valid, but it's one that should have been made decades ago, when local radio and then television began poaching on print to fill up their newscasts without the expense of building an independent news operation. Over time, readers became viewers and as the newspaper habit wore off, most people didn't mind the loss of detail and depth as long as they got from the Tube the gist of what was going on across the wider world.

Well, we let them get away with it.  And now as the print media stumbles, the flock of low-rent media buzzards feeds on the carcass. 

(To be sure, this blog is just one more bird in the hunt.  But at least we don't pretend LICOPAC.ORG should be anybody's primary news source.  We're a secondary source, one which provides comment on events documented by others, but only occasionally doing basic reporting.)

Should all this be of concern to anybody but journalists?  Probably not, unless you care what happens once the bones of print journalism are picked clean and the news scavengers have to look elsewhere -- to the government, the corporations, the politicians -- for their daily feed.

One alternative - still controversial - is an increase in public subsidies to keep print journalism alive.  The argument is being best made these days by a new book, The Death and Life of American Journalism, by John Nichols and Robert McChesney.  You can find a summary in the cover story in the Jan. 25 issue of The Nation:  Read it here (and then subscribe!):

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100125/nichols_mcchesney

On the other hand, there are those who prefer getting their news electronically instead of having to dig through the brush and slush for the smeared, soaked sling edition of the "Daily Bugle." 

And then there are those, like Henry David Thoreau, who find this daily wad of woeful news just too depressing and too distracting from the simple joys of everyday life.  Note this excerpt Hummingbird retrieved this morning from Thoreau's journal (Jan. 20, 1852):

"You cannot serve two masters. It requires more than a day’s devotion to know and to possess the wealth of a day. To read of things distant and sounding betrays us into slighting these which are then apparently near and small."

More of this heresy at: http://hdt.typepad.com/henrys_blog/

-- David Lore

Comments

[Eloise DeZwarte]

You sound like my father. He published a weekly newspaper in Pella, Iowa, during the late forties to early sixties. We got the DeMoines Tribune and he read it faithfully and encourged us to read it. I value newspapers because of the research and reliability which you wrote about. My siblings and children are newspaper readers also. We get two daily papers which I could not do without. Thanks for your comments.

[Jack Bellay]

David: For the spreading of fast breaking news, the Internet and radio and tv will win out over newspapers. However, tv and radio normally will not provide the in-depth analysis and detailed account of news events. Unfortunately, many "busy" people are satisfied with superficial coverage of the news,the norm for radio and tv stations.

In my opinion, newspapers ought to copyright those in-depth articles which are costly to produce and ask the Associated Press not to distribute them to its members without payment to the originating newspaper.

[David Lore]

Jack,

The Dispatch and other Ohio newspapers have been fighting back against uncredited distributions by the AP...see May 8 post on this at:
http://www.licopac.org/licking_county_issue_pac/2009/05/why-youre-reading-pd-stories-in-the-dispatch.html

[Joe Ann Douglass]

We two, have been reading the printed news all of our lives. Trying to see all sides of the news has become a huge challenge since most papers and all TV stations editorlize on the front pages . We fear for our democracy as less and less unbiased news seeps through. Half of my sons read the newspapers and only one grandson that accounts for 10 college graduates.. Posted by Bob & Joe Douglass