[The column below was rejected by the editor of the otherwise-excellent newspaper for which I recently started writing a column. He said the subject was a "third rail" in his organization. As you read, picture yourself with an old-fashioned pile of newsprint in your lap.]You are holding a dinosaur in your hands.
With apologies to the owners of the [publication], whose business acumen and beneficence are the reasons you are able to read these words, newspapers as we know them will cease to exist well within the lifetime of nearly all of us. In the past four months alone, three venerable dailies – the Los Angeles Times, its co-owned Chicago Tribune and the unrelated Minneapolis Star Tribune, have all sought bankruptcy protection. A fourth -- the Rocky Mountain News in Denver -- just folded outright. Even the New York Times has had to turn to Mexico’s richest man, a telephone and media mogul, for a $250 million loan – at an astonishingly high interest rate of 14 percent.
If anything, the situation is even more dire here in northern New England. From Portland, where the out-of-state owners are busy trying to offload a pared down Press Herald for a fraction of what they paid for it, to Burlington, where the Gannett chain has long since reduced the Free Press to a state of bland mediocrity, cutbacks and caution are the norm. And let’s not even talk about the Union Leader in Manchester, where the ghost of William Loeb perpetuates a relentlessly antediluvian agenda.
There are, of course, exceptions. The Rutland Herald received a well-deserved Pulitzer in 2001. The Concord Monitor and its sibling daily in Lebanon are thorough and lively. But they rely heavily on young reporters who tend to move on after a few years, leaving a lack of institutional memory in their wake that makes it challenging for the papers to hold newsmakers accountable over the long term.
That great regional backstop, the northern New England bureau of Associated Press, grows ever smaller and more stressed. “This is not the AP you worked for,” mused a former colleague recently, alluding to my 1981-86 tenure with AP in New York, Washington and Portland. In these parts, AP lost much of its luster in 2006 by firing Montpelier correspondent Christopher Graff after 28 years for running a column by Senator Patrick Leahy about the Bush Administration’s hostility to the federal Freedom of Information Act.
Time Magazine recently published a cover story arguing that the Internet is killing off the nation’s newspapers, calling for a system of article-by-article “micropayment” (similar to buying songs on iTunes) to create a reliable revenue stream. Others advocate government support for newspapers.
The latter suggestion is utterly screwball, given that newspapers are supposed to investigate government rather than live off it. Micropayment? Helpful, possibly, in the same way that renting deck chairs by the minute would have made business sense for the owners of the Titanic on April 15, 1912.
Given that newspapers (or something very much like them, delivered via the Internet) are crucial elements of democracy and community, what is needed is more fundamental reform. It is time for the readers to own the organizations that provide news to them.
Scarce citrus fruit drove a bunch of Dartmouth faculty families to start a buying club in 1936. Today that buying club is the thriving, $70 million-a-year Hanover Consumer Cooperative Society. You don’t have to serve on the board of the Co-op (as I do) to know how well the consumer cooperative model works in providing people with goods they need without exploiting them. The incentives and accountabilities align perfectly.
In our region today, journalism is where citrus fruit was in 1936. The good, fresh product is harder and harder to obtain. The only vibrant newspapers around here, from the Spectator to the Monitor to the Herald, are family-owned. We know, because we watched it happen in Portland (and could soon see it happen with the Sulzberger family at the Times in New York), that family owners typically decide to cash out eventually. When it happens in our region, a reader-owned consumer cooperative is the right entity to step up and take these storied news franchises into the future.
Given that this is an untried approach that would call on consumers not just to subscribe and to read but also to invest and to lead, the challenge is formidable and success is not inevitable. But journalism is a vital commodity and the market is failing us. No more newspaper? I’d rather die of scurvy.
With apologies to the owners of the [publication], whose business acumen and beneficence are the reasons you are able to read these words, newspapers as we know them will cease to exist well within the lifetime of nearly all of us. In the past four months alone, three venerable dailies – the Los Angeles Times, its co-owned Chicago Tribune and the unrelated Minneapolis Star Tribune, have all sought bankruptcy protection. A fourth -- the Rocky Mountain News in Denver -- just folded outright. Even the New York Times has had to turn to Mexico’s richest man, a telephone and media mogul, for a $250 million loan – at an astonishingly high interest rate of 14 percent.
If anything, the situation is even more dire here in northern New England. From Portland, where the out-of-state owners are busy trying to offload a pared down Press Herald for a fraction of what they paid for it, to Burlington, where the Gannett chain has long since reduced the Free Press to a state of bland mediocrity, cutbacks and caution are the norm. And let’s not even talk about the Union Leader in Manchester, where the ghost of William Loeb perpetuates a relentlessly antediluvian agenda.
There are, of course, exceptions. The Rutland Herald received a well-deserved Pulitzer in 2001. The Concord Monitor and its sibling daily in Lebanon are thorough and lively. But they rely heavily on young reporters who tend to move on after a few years, leaving a lack of institutional memory in their wake that makes it challenging for the papers to hold newsmakers accountable over the long term.
That great regional backstop, the northern New England bureau of Associated Press, grows ever smaller and more stressed. “This is not the AP you worked for,” mused a former colleague recently, alluding to my 1981-86 tenure with AP in New York, Washington and Portland. In these parts, AP lost much of its luster in 2006 by firing Montpelier correspondent Christopher Graff after 28 years for running a column by Senator Patrick Leahy about the Bush Administration’s hostility to the federal Freedom of Information Act.
Time Magazine recently published a cover story arguing that the Internet is killing off the nation’s newspapers, calling for a system of article-by-article “micropayment” (similar to buying songs on iTunes) to create a reliable revenue stream. Others advocate government support for newspapers.
The latter suggestion is utterly screwball, given that newspapers are supposed to investigate government rather than live off it. Micropayment? Helpful, possibly, in the same way that renting deck chairs by the minute would have made business sense for the owners of the Titanic on April 15, 1912.
Given that newspapers (or something very much like them, delivered via the Internet) are crucial elements of democracy and community, what is needed is more fundamental reform. It is time for the readers to own the organizations that provide news to them.
Scarce citrus fruit drove a bunch of Dartmouth faculty families to start a buying club in 1936. Today that buying club is the thriving, $70 million-a-year Hanover Consumer Cooperative Society. You don’t have to serve on the board of the Co-op (as I do) to know how well the consumer cooperative model works in providing people with goods they need without exploiting them. The incentives and accountabilities align perfectly.
In our region today, journalism is where citrus fruit was in 1936. The good, fresh product is harder and harder to obtain. The only vibrant newspapers around here, from the Spectator to the Monitor to the Herald, are family-owned. We know, because we watched it happen in Portland (and could soon see it happen with the Sulzberger family at the Times in New York), that family owners typically decide to cash out eventually. When it happens in our region, a reader-owned consumer cooperative is the right entity to step up and take these storied news franchises into the future.
Given that this is an untried approach that would call on consumers not just to subscribe and to read but also to invest and to lead, the challenge is formidable and success is not inevitable. But journalism is a vital commodity and the market is failing us. No more newspaper? I’d rather die of scurvy.
0 comments:
Post a Comment