The paper.
May. 26th, 2009 05:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
slowsculptureWhen I was in kindergarten, a teacher once asked me 'what does your father do?' And my answer, as mom still likes to reminisce, was 'he reads me the Sunday funnies.' What? It seemed like a perfectly relevant answer, at the time. If she'd asked me his job, I would've told her he was an aerial photographer, and yes, I could spell it. But reading me comics from the Tulsa paper on Sunday mornings was, to my mind, a much more important part of his weekly routine. He was introducing his son to the power of small, short-cycle local publishing. And it worked. I've grown up with a healthy reverence for newspapers. I have friends in the business, and occasionally heroes. Hell, I was at the Review-Journal's last Christmas party. I respect the paper.
And I'm only telling you this so it won't sound like a grudge, when I say that the newspaper industry has been the sole architect of its own demise. I am genuinely sorry to see them disappearing. The loss of an outlet is very real. But there's something in the way the industry is trying to eulogize itself, lately, that sets my bullshit detector off. Here it is, in paraphrase:
"The mission of the local newspaper is to provide citizens with responsive, original reporting on issues of relevance to their community. Unfortunately, we were unable to remain competitive in the face of competition from the internet."
The problem is, both statements can't be true. If Craigslist beat you at your own game, then your game was not journalism. Sure, their business model was broken. Well, welcome to the century. If these companies had so much faith in the product they were selling to readers, they could have monetized that value. People will gladly pay for a newspaper - Ask any 7-11 cashier. But the industry didn't make any effort to change the game, ever. Readers were the product, not the customer. They assumed that people would buy the paper, no matter how hard it became to find the news content (or for that matter, the funnies) beneath all the ads, or how many local reporters they dumped in favor of one more wire-service column - and they were wrong.
In short, they died because they offered so little to the reader, they lost relevance to advertisers. Only, now they're crying about all of us local non-subscribers, who just didn't love democracy enough to support our local paper. Is anybody else offended by that?
And I'm only telling you this so it won't sound like a grudge, when I say that the newspaper industry has been the sole architect of its own demise. I am genuinely sorry to see them disappearing. The loss of an outlet is very real. But there's something in the way the industry is trying to eulogize itself, lately, that sets my bullshit detector off. Here it is, in paraphrase:
"The mission of the local newspaper is to provide citizens with responsive, original reporting on issues of relevance to their community. Unfortunately, we were unable to remain competitive in the face of competition from the internet."
The problem is, both statements can't be true. If Craigslist beat you at your own game, then your game was not journalism. Sure, their business model was broken. Well, welcome to the century. If these companies had so much faith in the product they were selling to readers, they could have monetized that value. People will gladly pay for a newspaper - Ask any 7-11 cashier. But the industry didn't make any effort to change the game, ever. Readers were the product, not the customer. They assumed that people would buy the paper, no matter how hard it became to find the news content (or for that matter, the funnies) beneath all the ads, or how many local reporters they dumped in favor of one more wire-service column - and they were wrong.
In short, they died because they offered so little to the reader, they lost relevance to advertisers. Only, now they're crying about all of us local non-subscribers, who just didn't love democracy enough to support our local paper. Is anybody else offended by that?