Why The Panic?

Pardon the late post, I was visitng a friend in Lawrence and couldn't get his computer to connect to Blogger...apparently they're not that advanced at kU.

I’m not as upset as some people when people tell me that the newspaper business is dying. People say newspapers are dinosaurs in an age of instant information and infotainment. I just don’t understand why all the panic. The newspaper industry has been developing and evolving for the last 650 years, since Gutenberg invented movable type. If it has been maintaining relevancy and keeping afloat that long, I’m sure that it can manage to do so now and in the foreseeable future.
American Journalism Review’s article Tribune Tribulations has great insight into what media in the future SHOULD NOT do. Tribune Co.’s acquisition of Times Mirror gave it both newspaper and TV stations in the top three markets, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. They proposed a plan of “synergy”. Basically Tribune Co. tried to bring together “…local market media companies and [put] them together into a major, national footprint.” The plan failed for many reasons, including bad business strategies, but also “friction over centralized versus local control of Tribune’s operations (American Journalism Review, 12/1-06/07).”
It’s my thought that in this new age of instant news where there are so many news outlets available to everyone, as presented by the research in class, newspapers need to delve more into local coverage than national news. If someone wants national news, he can go to CNN.com while he's surfing the web at work or when he gets up in the morning to check his email. Local news is why they purchase their newspapers. Most people (and we are not most people) don’t care as much about what is happening in LA if they’re in Chicago – even if it’s a relatively major event. They can see a short article about that event on CNN.com, or if they really care LATimes.com. What they want in their Chicago newspaper is Chicago news.
In addition to becoming more localized, I believe that newspapers may need to become more specialized. Personally, I hate the idea of a paper being consciously slanted one way or another politically, but that is what most people already think of news outlets. According to the research presented in class the number of people who thought news organizations were biased politically has risen from 45 percent to 59 percent. Someone mentioned in class the fact that British newspapers are often politically specialized and are open about it. At least that way you know what you’re getting. I suspect that the 35 percent of people felt that news organizations got facts straight (down 20 percent) are a mixture of those who feel news actually is objective and those who just read news from outlets that have political views similar to their own.
I believe in years to come there will still be a place for objective journalism – but as the study we looked at in class said, “Consumers want their media when they want it, how they want it and in whatever quantities they want it.” Take Vanity Fair, for example. “[Editor Graydon] Carter’s political passion has unquestionably benefited Vanity Fair. It has deepened his commitment to serious journalism and rescued the magazine from a fallow period around the millennium (Columbia Journalism Review 1-2/07).” Vanity Fair was experiencing both advertising and circulation lulls around the turn of the century, but a refocusing toward liberal politics boosted circulation and ad sales to new highs. People knew what they were getting, because Carter was open about how he felt politically and how he was going to point his magazine. People would be a lot less skeptical of media if the outlets were open about their political affiliations and specializations.
The future of media lies in localization and specialization. Leave the national news to the national news outlets like the networks and USA Today. Political affiliation and specialization as they have in Great Britain may be the answer in the U.S. There is no reason to panic; these are very attainable goals that will gain journalists and media outlets much respect and appreciation from readers and critics.