The Future of Newspapers (and Journalism)

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Digested First Pages:

Richard Farson I am especially proud to introduce James Goldsborough as the leader of our new conference, The Future of Newspapers (and Journalism). Jim has a most impressive record of achievements. He has written on national and foreign affairs for four decades, both from the United States and abroad, where he worked as a foreign correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, International Herald Tribune and Newsweek Magazine for 14 years, reporting from more than 40 countries. He is a former Edward R. Murrow Fellow at New York’s Council on Foreign Relations and senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is author of "Rebel Europe: Living with a Changing Continent" which was received with raves from the critics. He has written numerous articles in leading publications, including Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Politique Etrangere, the New York Times Magazine, Fortune, Newsweek, Los Angeles Times and Readers Digest. He worked as associate editor of the San Jose Mercury News for seven years prior to joining the San Diego Union Tribune, where he served as editorial page editor and syndicated foreign affairs columnist for 14 years. He has a degree in economics from UCLA, attended UC Berkeley Law School and has been a reporter on the San Francisco Examiner, Honolulu Advertiser and Arizona Republic. We look forward to a productive discussion of this critically important subject. So welcome, Jim.

James O. Goldsborough A few years ago I came across an article by cyberspace guru Esther Dyson with this comment: "With electronic distribution, there’s no real reason for recipes and foreign coverage to be stuck together in one big wad of paper." Last month I saw a similar comment by Ken Auletta, who writes on the media for The New Yorker: "There is something almost pre-historic about using expensive newsprint and elaborate delivery systems, to homes and newsstands, in the age of the Internet."

I hate their pessimism. The clank of a linotype machine was always music to my ears. But how easy is it to refute what they say? As the population rises, U.S. newspaper circulation has fallen to something just over 55 million daily. The profession has changed drastically over the 40 years since I started as a cub reporter on the San Francisco Examiner, and not always for the better. But I remain convinced that daily newspapers have real advantages over all other forms of journalism — advantages in convenience, organization, presentation and experience. The newspapers that exploit those advantages — as some are and some aren’t — will thrive. Fifty-five million daily copies may be down from the 65 million of a few years ago, but it’s still one of every two households. With 2.5 persons per household, that’s one newspaper for every two people. The danger sign is that the average age of those 55 million is going up. Newspapers must hook and hold young people as in the past, a theme I hope we can address in our discussion.

Dyson finds daily newspapers outmoded and inefficient, but they are still the main source of community-centered news. The networks and cyberspace have no connection to communities, and local television mostly gets its news from the local newspaper. Commercial radio is a wasteland. No wonder we’re nostalgic for Ed Murrow. If newspaper ownership has become increasingly concentrated, there are still hundreds of independent owners across the nation. The Internet is growing, but how many people want to install a computer at the breakfast table or take one to bed? And let’s not forget that the newspaper business is profitable. As Auletta reports in The New Yorker (Oct. 10), some companies (e.g., McClatchy, Newhouse) believe that adding staff to achieve quality is the key to newspaper survival, while others (Tribune Company, Gannett, Knight Ridder) are more interested in cutting staff to reward shareholders. I’ve worked for both kinds and find it no surprise that McClatchy and Newhouse are increasing readership while the others are losing it.

Participant Hard to think of a more timely conference.

The paper that can produce good news, have a great website, and no salaries, wins. Since that is the extreme, the real winners will be those who have some advertising and low cost.

In that reality, what happens? I remember with ILF (WBSI in ‘83): even then I noticed that our conference, because of people all over the world and some diversity of background, gave me the feeling that reading the conferences was more likely to yield up a more impressive view of reality than could be gained by reading a single newspaper, such as the Times or Wall Street Journal.

I have felt that become even truer with blogging. Juancole.com, Billmon.org, talkingpointsmemo.com give more detailed, analytic and courageous news than anything (yes) in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal.

This is now more reinforced by new additions such as dailykos.com, tpmcafe.com, and the interesting memorandum.com.

The willingness of the major press to have accepted Bush's Iraq agenda was the end for me. Even today, the way the press climbs on the Supreme Court and avoids the WMD issues behind Libby, make me sick at heart.

And deeper, the press—I am not blaming—just looking for causes—must be in the economic mainstream for its own cash flow, but the economic mainstream is the collusion of two parties and their leadership to arrange for more wealth for the top and less for the rest, basing their rhetoric on a "base" of religious fundamentalists on the right, and alienated minorities on the left. These two "bases" add up to at best 20% of the country. There really is no conservative or liberal agenda. It’s all Halloween to spook each other. The press plays the role of maintaining the illusion as if it were reality.

What is shocking is we all know this. Now what?

Participant To support Doug's concern about the nature of the information one gets from newspapers as compared to the better blogs, in the run up to the Iraq war, every one of the top fifty newspapers editorially supported that invasion, but that was far from the case with the blogs. The newspapers did offer a range of opinion, but never anything from the far left. As a former editorial page editor of a major newspaper, Jim, how do you think fifty newspapers would sign up for the war, when so many of us could see the deception, futility and hidden agenda. Surely they must have seen that too. Is Doug right about having to stay in the economic mainstream, and that was the price?

Participant Doug, I think that it may be difficult to exclude any of us who may feel that we are a member of an "alienated minority", but even if we limited it to blacks and browns, those groups in combination with the religious fundamentalists probably amount to more like forty percent or more of our population. Can you elaborate on your last paragraph? I'm not sure I get your full meaning.

Participant I think the number tends to be overstated. The hard religious right and the hard left are not as many. People act as if they are there as a way of protest. I think we do not have good numbers that disaggregate these effects.

The fundamental idea is that the leadership of the Republicans and Democrats share a common interest in pulling money into their own and broad mainstream pockets. The twenty percent or so of the population that has done well in the last decade. The Republicans appeal to a "base" that is raw boned right wing, but more religious than political. But that is not the bulk of Republican voters. The Democrats appeal to the abortion, affirmative action, and minority rights advocates, but these are not the bulk of Democratic voters. Most black and brown voters are not hard core minority rights types, but moderate, even reasonable.

The press highlights the base and misses the real story, that after WWII the country got rich, and a time came—the ‘70's, I think—when taking from others (the brokers) became more rewarding than making something. Taking has been the game, passing taxes onto the poorer (in hidden forms such as longer commutes, more expensive food, higher interest rates, as well as increased sales taxes and—hey, important for them, cigarette taxes). The result has been a collusion among leadership and the older generation to keep what they have, use the law to get more of it, and damn the next generation and the workers. (Note, wages are flat, which means that on average they are flat. Add in increased costs and the fact that for many they are below average despite Lake Wobegon).

The press has supported this view of the world. The entire bottom half of the population doesn't count and hardly has a political role. Shocking.

James O. Goldsborough Thanks to Doug, we're off to a lively start. I would correct Richard only in this: The 50 leading U.S. newspapers did not all "editorially support" the Iraq war. According to an E&P survey, not one editorial page was "strongly anti-war," a position which was generally in line with public opinion. If some newspapers failed to write editorials strongly opposing the war, at least they employed columnists who strongly opposed the war, including this one. As I wrote before the war started, "the nation's watchdogs failed to provide context or balance to the war-whooping talking place on talk radio and cable television."

As defenses go that's pretty lame, but at least it shows that not all newspapers were gung-ho for war. When the Colombia Journalism Review examined editorial pages on six of the most influential papers—New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, USA Today and Washington Post—it found wide differences over the war and concluded that not one of them "held the Bush administration to an adequate standard of proof." The fact is the Los Angeles Times and New York Times were very skeptical about the war. That they weren't as clear-sighted as, say, The Nation or Howard Dean, is regrettable, but newspapers were being lied to like everyone else. I don't think it's fair to compare a newspaper that writes for a million people and has to weigh what it says against the facts in hand and a blog that writes for a handful of ideological soul mates.

Participant Jim, I don't recall where I read that the top fifty newspapers supported the war, but even if the correct interpretation was that none were strongly anti-war, given how terribly wrong-headed many of us thought it to be, including you, it still remains a rather remarkable statistic. Are you saying that the editorial pages are constructed to accommodate or not depart from public opinion? Fifty out of fifty going along is really a jarring statistic.

Let me pose the issue differently. Let's talk about the Fourth Estate. Journalism, our protector because it brings us the truth, is presumably best represented in newspapers because I think they employ the largest investigative staffs. Shouldn't the profession of journalism have positioned the editors to be way ahead of the rest of us? I hate to think that the editors of all these great newspapers with hundreds of journalists at work went along with the war because they were lied to just like the rest of us. Many of the rest of us, millions of us, knew it was trumped up. Even if the newspapers did also print anti-war columnists like you, it still seems that something else was going on besides exercising editorial judgment based on the practice of journalism. Obviously editorial pages are steered by the publishers, and they have ideological positions, but how could all fifty, many of which are opposed to the Bush administration, go along? Is there an economic factor that explains it? Shouldn't the newspaper be ahead of struggling periodicals like The Nation? Am I being asked to believe in an editorial position because the newspaper has to reach so many people? Isn't that commoditization? Is that the future of newspapers as it has become the present for broadcasting? Or is the Iraq war a special case when "the watchdogs (the journalists, I guess) failed to provide context or balance...."?

We can't know the future, and even the present is invisible in most respects. But maybe in these conferences we can make the present more visible, which is the best avenue to the future. Jim, you have the special ability to make the workings of newspapers visible to us. I hope you know just how interested all of us are in the inside story.

Participant Just a few late thoughts: Evidence that the New York Times was skeptical? Suggestions on what to read? Daily Kos got 30 million hits in October. Josh Marshall‘s writing seems to me a model of good research and compares well, if not better.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/

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