I've been thinking a lot lately about the future of newspapers. It's not just that I can't imagine how we'll potty train puppies or wrap fish in a world without them; I have a hard time understanding how the news will work without them.
The problem is that the interwebs are full of opinions. Mine included. And there's no shortage of niche material on a wide variety of subjects. Certainly we can all learn to get along without the local rag printing movie reviews and stock quotes. But I have a hard time understanding who will cover local and state government. The wire services and nationals that survive the transition to the web will still cover federal government. But how will you know when the City is about to rezone that property next to you? Who will dig through the state budget when our legislators tell fibs about funding?
The truth is, and real journalists will let you know at great length about how this works, TV and Radio have always relied on newspapers to do the real reporting. Listen to your local news broadcast and note how many times they say "in today's such and such Gazette-Herald." Blogs are just the latest to get their start from ripping content from mainstream media.
I have been troubled by the fact that nobody seems to be thinking about this as newspapers shut down or make clumbsy transitions to the web. Urbanophile to the rescrue.
I won't try to add to what he's said (even if you're not interested in the content, check it out if only to appreciate impressive analysis from a citizen journolist.)
One thing that particularly struck me was this:
"News organizations will be more overtly partisan. While some might bristle at this notion, the idea of neutrality and objectivity in news has always been problematic. If it totally went away, that would only be a reversion to the status quo ante. There's probably a longer tradition of overtly partisan journalism than objective. When you read what they used to say about each other in the papers in the 18th and 19th centuries, arguably a golden age for newspapers, it might be more vicious than today, but it was also certainly more entertaining. This also lends itself to a publishing model based on marketing expenditures and support from people with a stake in the message. This seems emminently more sustainable than a model based on a "wall of separation" between advertising and editorial."
The notion that the press should pretend to be completely unbiased, as though they were some sort of angelic superhumans capable of complete detachment from all stories, is a relatively new and uniquely American phenomenon. When you travel abroad and pick up a paper you immediately know which faction it represents. The advantage to this is that you don't have to decipher the reporter's intentions. It's out in the open. In addition, it ensures that there is always a loyal watchdog no matter who is in power. We've been slowly headed in that direction for a while now, but it's time to be up front about it.
