Because working in the news industry these days feels a bit like being the last obituary writer standing, newspapers have been filled with columns and articles lately mourning the death of a veritable American industry, or kicking against the pricks, as Nick Cave and the prophet Saul would have said.
You have your optimists -- like Richmond's own Tom Silvestri, who thummed his nose at the naysayers a few weeks ago in the Times-Dispatch, and you have everyone else. In the Washington Post, today alone, there were three lengthy looks at the future of news -- one macro piece that uses the death of Denver's Rocky Mountain as a foil for a staggering industry, and two columns that paint a very real picture of what we'll lose when the newspaper industry finishes contracting.
The reality is that we've already lost. And I'm not much of an apologist for another American industry that sucked as much profit out of its product as it possibly could before it casually tossed it into a corner. Or a romantic.
Columnist Marc Fisher at the Washington Post looks at news coverage of the General Assembly, and while he doesn't describe a sick feeling in his stomach, he should. It's a feeling every citizen should have, because essentially the only watchdog of and counterbalance to government has shriveled up while we weren't looking. Actually, we were looking -- at free content on the Internet.
Fisher lets Virginia's governor and a longtime reporter for the Virginian-Pilot explain what we're losing:
"The smaller the press corps gets, the more you see personality stories rather than pieces about what is at stake for people," says Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine. "Smoking in restaurants is always going to get covered, but now, when we make big changes in mental health or foster care, nobody covers it. That has a real impact: It would be hard for campaigns to get even more superficial, but they might."
"Time is much more precious now," Fiske says. The Virginian-Pilot has gone from a five-person capital bureau a decade ago to two full-time reporters, with one more during the session. "When we had the larger bureaus, you could do the good investigative piece. Most sessions, somebody would find someone doing something wrong. Now, we can only really cover the flow of legislation."
Former crime reporter David Simon, who captured his days on the streets of Baltimore in "Homicide: Life on the Streets," goes further than Fisher in his depiction of a community without the accountability that good reporting can bring. He uses a police shooting in February as an example of what happens when government closes ranks to protect its own, and no one is reponsible for calling bullshit:
Half-truths, obfuscations and apparent deceit -- these are the wages of a world in which newspapers, their staffs eviscerated, no longer battle at the frontiers of public information. And in a city where officials routinely plead with citizens to trust the police, where witnesses have for years been vulnerable to retaliatory violence, we now have a once-proud department's officers hiding behind anonymity that is not only arguably illegal under existing public information laws, but hypocritical as well.
There is a lot of talk nowadays about what will replace the dinosaur that is the daily newspaper. So-called citizen journalists and bloggers and media pundits have lined up to tell us that newspapers are dying but that the news business will endure, that this moment is less tragic than it is transformational.
Well, sorry, but I didn't trip over any blogger trying to find out McKissick's identity and performance history. Nor were any citizen journalists at the City Council hearing in January when police officials inflated the nature and severity of the threats against officers. And there wasn't anyone working sources in the police department to counterbalance all of the spin or omission.
I didn't trip over a herd of hungry Sun reporters either, but that's the point. In an American city, a police officer with the authority to take human life can now do so in the shadows, while his higher-ups can claim that this is necessary not to avoid public accountability, but to mitigate against a nonexistent wave of threats. And the last remaining daily newspaper in town no longer has the manpower, the expertise or the institutional memory to challenge any of it.
The point here isn't whether newspapers deserve to die, becuse they sort of do, having pissed away so much of their credibility over the past two decades of corporate stewardship. The point is that their death is going to fundamentally change our ability as citizens to stay connected, stay informed, and to hold our elected and appointed officials accountable.
A great example of just how topsy-turvy the inbalance is between government and an industry dedicated to covering it: There are more paid people working in City Hall pitching stories and spinning day-to-day policies than there are reporters covering City Hall for print, television, radio and Internet outlets combined.
And, so, if I were publisher of the Richmond Times-Dispatch and I were
interested in reinventing my brand, I'd probably start asking myself
(and everyone I met), "How can my paper position itself to be the
catalyst for every important community conversation in the region?"
You can probably bet part of the answer involves divorcing your paper from the very financial interests who are keeping it afloat today.
There is at least one space in our future where the news industry can remain useful and relevant -- the newspaper as community advocate.
Moving from the very old model of newspaper as being the single space where facts about a community were captured and recorded, a real community newspaper will position itself as the watchdog, advocate and storyteller of its community. This is quite a twist for reporters who pride themselves on being impartial recorders of events, but I think it has the potential to return newspapers to a position of power and value in the communities they serve.
Unfortunately, in order to be effective, credible and successful, a newspaper moving aggressively into this space has to demonstrate an ability to abandon its seat at the corporate table. That's a tough call for a publication like the Times-Dispatch, whose last waning note of influence in the community is as a corporate citizen.
I don't know about you, but I'd pick up a paper that challenged me to be a better citizen; called local governments and corporations to account; and actively called on the region to live up to its best potential. It sure would be more interesting than the one we have today.
