It's not quite as bad as it sounds... I don't think

In our citizen journalism class the other day, Professor Bentley mentioned that the blogosphere as it is currently structured would most likely collapse– or at least change dramatically– if The Associated Press decided to make its content available only to traditional media outlets. Every political, sports and even fashion blog needs to start somewhere, and, at least for now, that somewhere is still, almost without exception, us – the traditional journalists. Anybody can have an opinion, after all, but without a framework of hard facts propping it up, that opinion isn’t worth much more than the air (or hard drive space) with which it is delivered. That’s why, whenever a blogger feels compelled to give an opinion, he or she usually links to a traditional news story to provide background and context. Many of the blogosphere’s most publicized triumphs have, in fact, revolved around traditional media (Dan Rather’s falsified documents being the most well-known example), and that isn’t going to change anytime soon.
That said, newspapers are going to be in trouble if they continue along exactly the same path. They are perceived as slow, boring and inconvenient. One solution we mentioned in class was to make the way we deliver the news more convenient and technologically compatible (like EmPrint). But reversing the statistics we talked about in class won’t be as simple as just altering the medium, because newspapers are not like other businesses. Let me try to give an admittedly oversimplified explanation.
Every industry in the United States is dealing with technological advances right now that are making business easier in many ways, but that will, in other ways, force us to change our ways of life– and perhaps not in a positive way. Wal-Mart, for example, has cornered the market on retail shopping and is putting smaller companies out of business all across America. There are a lot of positives to Wal-Mart (it forces prices down, it’s convenient, etc...), but there are also negatives (low paying jobs, little choice, poor quality).
At the turn of the 20th century, America faced a similar problem. The United States, which had been a nation of farmers, was quickly transforming into an industrial country. Hundreds of thousands of farmers were forced to live off subsidies or move to the cities where they adopted new, urban lifestyles. At the time, the death of the American farmer was seen as a big problem. But people adapted. They learned new skills and got new jobs, and the country is probably better off for it now. Today, as Wal-Mart homogenizes the retail industry and the old automotive giants face steady decline in the face of overseas competition, Americans face a similar problem: We must adapt or face the consequences. I think that in this area we’ll adapt, as we have in the past, and things will turn out okay.
The same kind of thing happened in the newspaper industry. Cities that once had several daily newspapers were eventually left with one or two. Like we talked about in class, newspapers that had at one time printed slanted, partisan stories started putting out unbiased news in an effort to appeal to a larger readership. The industry evolved in order to turn a profit, and it’s ironic that we now think of these principles as our ethical, not monetary, responsibility to uphold. But that’s where newspapers differ from automobiles. Our only purpose is not to make money.
In “The News About the News,” the authors talk about a shift in journalism away from information and toward entertainment, and they warn that this sort of change will undermine our highest responsibility to the public. That’s why we can’t do what other industries do and simply adapt to the market (which is craving glossed over entertainment over hard news at the moment), because that would undermine our real purpose altogether.
My favorite chapter in the book is Chapter Four: Newspapers: Where the News (Mostly) Comes From. That’s because it lets us know that the situation is not quite as dire as all those statistics make it out to be. Even though people say their trust of media outlets is at an all-time low, there isn’t anybody they’d rather turn to than us when they need news most. The authors write that while Sept. 11, 2001, was a day of television for most Americans, “September 12 belonged to newspapers, and reminded us why, even now, decades into the electronic era, newspapers remain so important” because “already on that first day the better newspapers had discovered new facts about” the attacks that were not mentioned in the television coverage, and most major newspapers sold more copies than they ever had before.
This is only one case, and it’s an extreme one, too. But it does give us an idea about how we can get out of this hole. It won’t be through new media or more entertainment news or greater homogenization of the market– it will be through tough, thorough reporting, which is still better in newspapers than it is anywhere else. That’s why the relationship between blogs and newspapers is more symbiotic than competitive. They need us to give them the information upon which they form their opinions, and we need them to keep us on edge. Even in fashion reporting.