News World Order
When I was a kid I had a paper route. It was a pretty good gig: after school my dog Tyrone and I would cruise the neighborhood stuffing the Pittsburgh Press into mailboxes or screen doors. On Sundays I’d pull my brother’s old go-cart then bomb it empty down the steep hill home. I’d read the papers as I went, learning about my town and the world beyond. This little Norman-Rockwell-in-bell-bottoms-scene didn’t last long, however. Within a few years of my passing the baton to the next punk, paperboys were gone – killed off by a greasy old creep from somewhere else driving my route – and many others – in his rusty Cordoba. The mercenaries had wiped us out. My first lesson that news is business.
There’s a lot of news about the news these days. The internet has caught the old guard off guard. Newspapers, in particular, have had a hard time adapting and are in a dire free-fall. Major city papers across the country, having bled money for years, are finally going belly up. Seattle, Denver, San Francisco. Small local papers are dropping like flies. This week monoliths like The New York Times and The Washington Post announced major layoffs as their stock prices keep falling. Politicians are talking about media bailouts. Are we witnessing the death of the newspaper?
Then again, so what? Polls show a majority of Americans don’t really care if their local paper folds. After all, long before the internet, they began leaving newspapers in favor of the sirens-and-fires coverage on the local TV news. Each era must ride changes in technology – the town crier once lost his job to the printing press. But that’s assuming news is news. It is not. Newspapers are very good at in-depth investigative journalism. Whether it’s blockbuster stuff like Watergate and whistleblowers or small time stuff like your town council jerk taking grease for a building permit, journalism matters in our lives. There’s no substitute for a snooping reporter to keep it all real and honest. Can our new modes of information carry the torch? After years of doom and gloom, we’re starting to see the News World Order take shape in a positive way, led by President Obama.
What’s the News World Order look like? On Thursday, the President held the first-ever internet town hall meeting. 100,000 people submitted questions – some of them video – and more than 3,000,000 people voted on their favorites. Obama answered the winning questions, streaming live on the White House website. His campaign for the presidency is legendary for bringing politics into the 21st century by harnessing the power of the internet. One of the founders of Facebook ran his online community campaign, which created a foot soldier army never before seen. It’s been fascinating and encouraging to watch him, now that he’s President, transform the White House website into an interactive hub that includes hipster stuff like blogs and videos. In his press conferences, too, he’s shaken things up by calling on reporters from websites – Huffington Post and Politico – which is hugely symbolic of the shift towards the power of new media. Now, I view all this democratic flash and sparkle with a healthy dose of Orwellian skepticism. But if delivered even partially as promised, it’s a brave new era of populist power.
By the way, I’m a big fan of Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert and I don’t view them, as many do, as the death of civilization. I think that in between the jokes, they often have very important things to say that the corporate media is too afraid to tackle. I’m not really worried that the youngins are keeping up with the world through these guys.
But while comedy news and sites like the Huffington Post have been heralded as the model of the future, people seem to forget that they mostly gather and mash other people’s news. It’s symbiotic. Somebody’s still got to pay the original reporters. Huff’s staff and budget are a tiny fraction of the New York Times. This is beginning to change. Huffington is doing a great job expanding into original reporting. Bloggers are beginning to gain the clout and access necessary to serve an important role in the post-newspaper world. And this means less power to the corporate giants, which is always a good thing. We just have to keep our eye on the ball. We have to demand real reporting and reward those who perform it. And here is where, to my wife Kris’ amusement, I insert a few quotes from my main man Thomas Jefferson: “The press is the best instrument for enlightening the mind of man, and improving him as a rational, moral and social being”, “No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free no one ever will.”
The paperboy days are gone. How will our kids learn about the world? How do you get your news?
24 Comments
Ah Brian, Brian Brian! Thanks very much for this post. I am employed by The New York Times and as I sit here today unscathed by this last layoff, I wonder how much longer I will be employed…
I work for the internet side of the business, having seen the writing on the wall–with the loss of advertising in the newspaper. It is incomprehensible to me that newspapers would one day be defunct. It is very sad and frustrating to witness.
nytimes.com has some awesome bloggers: economix, the lede, freakonomics, well…etc….everyone read your newspapers! whether in print or online….do what you can to keep a newspaper from becoming like the dinosaur, extinct and impossible to find.
Thanks Brian…
I’m with you on John Stewart and Colbert. In fact, John Stewart ironically seems to do more real journalism than most of the talking heads on TV. Like the way he called Jim Cramer on his B.S. His appearance on Crossfire (“You’re hurting America!) was also a memorable one. Here is the Jim Cramer interview if anyone is interested. He’s the guy on CNBC that hoots and hollers about what stocks you should buy: http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=221516&title=jim-cramer-unedited-interview?collectionId=221532
Hey skyecat – Yes, the loss of ad revenue is fundamental. The papers all got so blindsided by Craigslist. Then the subscription model for online collapsed a few years ago, along with click ad rates. I should have written a little bit about the culture of getting something for nothing. Everyone has come to believe free content is a birthright – me included. I am a very loyal NYTimes reader and was more than happy to pay the $50 annually for premium access. You guys have done such a great job with the website. Always cutting edge design stuff and of course second-to-none content (the blogs you mentioned are my faves) Make me pay for it, please! In the meantime, I buy the paper whenever I can. Nothing like the sunday Times scattered around the hammock… Good luck, skyecat – hang in there!
Way to go Mr. Fasset on the blog. I am so impressed. First of all Thomas Jefferson is the bomb and I love everything he did and said. Secondly I think we are turning a corner in thinking we have to adapt. I realize that so much spin is put on the news that I really appreciate the on the ground reporting that makes life real. I had the good fortune to work with some good crews during Katrina and other major news makers that the main line media were keeping the real truths off the news. I want acess and truth. And I have to say I miss the paper news. I gather my news and have the Times delivered along with a more conservative paper to balance the views. The Times is my favorite. I also gather on the internet and the go to blogs. But I must say that our town paper is folding or at least on the verge of folding and people have gotten out of the habit when you can run 24 our news and give everyone sound bites.. The one worry I do have is that I do not want my world fed to me by a spoon not of my chosing. Meaning that I dont want big brother in the mix and I am afraid we are far past getting him to carry his but back to 1984. I hope that we can keep everyone learning about thier world and stretching they’re views. An informed and free press not the rupert murdock variety can cause huge change and start grassroots revolutions and I think we need that today. It is nice to think that all have acess to the blogs but I see lots of folks with no computers and no internet so we need a free press. Brian I love your blogging. It stimulates the part of my brain that is working daily on the city and state scene to make sure I am getting my agendas heard. Keep up the good work and you and Kris make a fabulous team and lola. Saatchi comes home from her spa vaca tomorrow and she will be ready for some carrots and brocoli stems. Take care and keep writing. Callie
Callie – thanks for the props. You bring up a good point about access. On the one hand the internet is incredibly democratizing – or as Thomas Friedman would say, flattening – in allowing so many voices to compete with the monopolies and “elites.” It puts mind-boggling amounts of information at your fingertips. And yet on the other hand, you have to have a computer and an internet connection to take part. With so many people scraping to survive, these expenses are a luxury. And so the poor fall further and further behind without access to knowledge that the rest of us enjoy.
I get all of my news from the internet- whether it’s op-Ed pieces from the NY Times website, political news from the Rachel Maddow show podcast, or the headlines of my tiny hometown paper (I now live 650 miles from my hometown, so I can’t really get it delivered any more). I listen to NPR and BBC news podcasts. I watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report because I have to have a bit of humor with my news- it’s pretty depressing otherwise, and their humor is so absurd that it makes the true absurdity of the actual news story less mind-boggling. (I need less mind-boggling when I come home dog-tired from work!). My husband and I own a tv, but mostly to watch movies- we don’t have cable. It’s pretty much all trash and it’s freakishly over-priced. This was a great blog, Brian-thanks!
I meant to write that I watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report on hulu.com; otherwise it doesn’t make any sense when you get to the bottom of the response and read that I don’t have cable. Sigh. It’s been a long week.
MSNBC is my news station of choice. I watch Fox to see what “the others” are thinking of things. I get local news via the local paper’s website.
This makes me kinda frown because something else is the books on computers. There is nothing I love more then a good crispy or smelly book and I get to underline and devour it instead of having to read it and have my eyes glare…
Hiya Brian…as always, LOVE your posts. I’m an NY Times subscriber, even out here in the Santa Fe desert, I slipper shuffle my way down the long drive to the little mailbox among the tumbleweed (and, this morning, snow) and get my connection to the Big Citay. I worry about the demise of newspapers because it’s the reporters who have claimed their calling in life to be the world’s watchdogs. If it wasn’t for them, we might have the heir of Richard Nixon holding his web-based town hall meeting. We have to be careful of who is spoonfeeding us what claptrap, and there was nothing better than two competing newspapers for every single community. (Reporters aren’t above biased claptrap themselves, that’s why every community needs two papers.) Without the 4th Estate, we’re at even greater risk of being sheeeeeeep. Who’s going to hold the folks in power accountable?
I do’t believe that bloggers will ever replace newspaper reporters or have their clout. Some blogs have told their bloggers, once paid, that there is no longer any payy associated with it. Blogging is cheap and very few are paid for it and those that are are paid very little. I love the New York Times and read it every day.
Thanks again Brian, interestingly, in 1994 I worked for The Associated Press when a new and cutting edge service was introduced–sending ads to newspapers (from ad agencies via .pdf) using AP satellites…How exciting a time that was! We were working with well over 1500 newspapers a day! The internet has been a blessing and a curse, eliminating printing presses and cutting tabloid sizes, in order to save revenue…
I am ready for the future, I am not afraid of the path I am on and have grown serene, but am still very sad to see the demise of newspapers all over the world.
Brian,
The loss of the newspaper era really saddens me. I grew up in a home where we all read sections of the paper at the breakfast table to each other. In fact, I’m so old that I remember a morning AND evening addition of The Philadelphia Bulletin (RIP). We also have a couple of boxes stashed away with old papers from historic moments…ie, JFK and MLK’s assassinations, the Flyers winning the Stanley Cup. I plan on passing this memorabilia on to my kids, too.
Moments like this are lost in the electronic era and it will be a great loss for our society. Thank you Brian for such a thought-provoking post.
When I was in college, the joke was we all lived inside a “bubble.” So in order to keep myself somewhat connected to the outside world, I set my internet browser homepage to latimes.com. It provided me with an opportunity to get some news and stay connected.
One time during finals week this great idea did backfire on me though. There was some sensational news story going on…I can’t remember exactly what it was, perhaps some criminal who was scheduled to recieve the death penalty? Yes, that was it! Anyways rather than write my final paper/study for the test, I got caught up in reading all the updates for this story!!
Hi Brian,
well when I’m not in class, job searching, doing homework, or working with our Program Committee I try to watch the news on TV.
Mmmmmm so glad I found your blog. Have been looking for some good vege inspiration
x
Sumea
I worked for a large newspaper for years, and I love holding my paper while I sip coffee in the mornings. It’s sad to see what’s happening in the industry (Craigslist has killed the classifieds, a big source of revenue). Check out http://news.newspaperproject.org.
I love reading the papers–over the internet. Occasionally, I’ll buy the print version or catch a copy of the NYT at school, but I can’t lower myself to just local, fox or CNN news…my life is not that bad yet.
ok, I stopped the evening news habit years ago.. so my news is from the net and (are you sitting down??) Howard Stern show.. I know I know, but I do learn a lot from Robin!
deb
Oh Deb, you are funny…but what are you sharing with your baby that you learn there, LOL! xoxo
Ok now settle down Sherry! Sam does not Listen to the Stern show! I forgot that I listen to NPR and numerous podcasts.. which BTW, we need a Kris/ CSL podcast show!!!!!!!!!!
more for you to do Kris,
love deb xoxoxoo
oh and the LA times.. ok < I get news all over the darn place.. it’s what brings the boys to the yard.. then I take their ball and yell at them to get off my lawn..
kidding
deb xoxoxoo News Maven At Large
Hi Brian,
I too love your posts. You know, while I am sad about the newspapers and have felt the effects of their demise for practically my whole life as my dad is in the business (the 80′s threw us for a loop), I have to say that I haven’t looked to our newspapers or news since I traveled in Central America 15 years ago and discovered that there was so much going on in the world not being reported in America. I was pretty disgusted. Maybe when the media stops catering to advertisers will I pay more attention to what they have to say. Jennifer
Here in Denver, I witnessed the death of a local paper. I am the only one of 5 in my home who reads the paper – daily! The ads are now taking over, but I love to READ! I do love well written, well researched blogs (like all the ones here!) and my 2 college boys are huge fans of Colbert. They have made many comments about how his show tells the “real news” – in a way that they can relate to! For this I am grateful =) Keep blogging bloggers and keep readin readers – GO INFO!!
March 27, 2009