What’s At Risk When We Lose Newspapers
A couple of months ago, my dental hygienist asked me what I did for a living.
When I told her, she stared blankly, shrugged and said, “I don’t read a newspaper.”
It’s not as if I had never heard that before.
What was different was the indifference with which she said it. Plenty of people don’t read the newspaper anymore — but they typically have the good sense to feel guilty about it. “I really should,” they confess, as if newspaper reading were a bit like flossing.
No doubt business is better in the floss market than it is in newspapers, where the mood, to quote the executive editor of the New York Times, is “funereal.”
Last year, the Hartford Courant announced that it would eliminate nearly 60 positions, shrink its number of news pages and deep-six its Connecticut section.
The news followed similarly bleak disclosures from The Baltimore Sun, which is slashing 100 jobs; The Palm Beach Post, which is cutting 300; The Boston Herald, which will eliminate 130 to 160 jobs; Gannett, which eliminated 1,000 jobs, and the McClatchy Group, owner of The Miami Herald, The Kansas City Star, The Sacramento Bee and others, where 1,400 jobs will be eliminated.
The culprit? Advertising revenue, which the Newspaper Association of America says plummeted 18 percent, or $2 billion, in the third quarter of last year. Add in the increased costs for newsprint, higher health insurance costs for employees, and increased competition from the Internet, and you’ve got what The New Yorker calls “a palpable sense of doom” in newsrooms. So desperate have newspapers become that, this past week, The New York Times began running color ads on its esteemed front page. The company reported that advertising revenue dropped nearly 21 percent in November.
Most (51 percent) Americans get their daily news from their local TV station — where the staples are crime, gore and weather-hype (”Apocalyptic deluge imminent. News at 10″). Saying you get your news from local TV is a bit like saying you enjoy French cuisine because you’ve been to Au Bon Pain.
Meanwhile, only 40 percent of Americans read a daily newspaper. That readership is largely male and typically older, despite the lame visual gymnastics newspapers have tried to make their product eye-catching. Newspapers rebuff suggestions that they’ve “dumbed down,” but anybody with a brain can tell you the newspaper you read today looks like a comic strip next to the one you read in 1974, when 77.6 percent of Americans read one.
But in 1974, there was no Internet, no cable TV and no satellite radio. There was also a gravity to news that is absent in today’s entertainment-drenched culture, where network news anchors, like Katie Couric, launch YouTube pages to jack up their hip quotient. None of this vaudevillian stuff has helped — and some of it may have hurt. In the last three years, independent, publicly-traded American newspapers have lost 42 percent of their market value, reports The New Yorker.
Since 1990, a quarter of all American newspaper jobs have disappeared. From 1999 to 2004, newspaper circulation dropped by 1.3 million, says The Newspaper Association of America. This for a product that costs less than a candy bar.
All of that can make a news hound feel more than a little irrelevant. Yet, the risk of complaining about declining newspaper readership is two-fold. First, one is preaching to the choir. Second, I, of course, have a vested interest in the future of newspapers. My frustration is that too few Americans realize that they do, too. Just look at the desperate measures the General Assembly is taking to try to save the New Britain Herald and the Bristol Press, two of what may be a slew of Journal Register newspapers scheduled to go to the gallows. What the legislators understand is that it’s about more than the newspapers. It’s about the community.
Nobody goes into reporting for the money. Journalism school graduates are the lowest-paid college-educated people in the labor force. Their average starting salary is $26,000 annually, miles less than the $36,694 that a starting teacher in Connecticut makes. But like teachers, they are believers. They cleave to this hoary notion that informed citizens actually produce a better society.
I’m not sure what F & S Oil customers would have done had they not had the local newspaper to inform them of their options. I’m not sure who else would have celebrated when the Wolcott Tech girls’ basketball team snapped a 265-game losing streak last December. I don’t know how many children in the Archdiocese of Boston might have been at risk for rape had The Boston Globe not exposed the priestly pedophilia crisis in 2000. Or how wounded veterans at the Walter Reed Hospital would have fared had The Washington Post not exposed their mistreatment, a series that evoked a national outcry and produced reforms by federal officials.
When my hygienist told me that she didn’t read newspapers, there was a part of me that wanted to say, “How dare you?” because behind the newspaper downturn is an overall dismissal of news that doesn’t intimately concern her. As one 38-year-old told me, “I turn on CNN and make sure the world hasn’t exploded. I turn on Scott Haney to make sure I can ride my bike. Other than that, I have no interest.”
In other words, “If it doesn’t concern me, what do I care?”
With attitudes like that, newspaper survival is the least of our problems.