… the death of newspapers

Did you know that newspapers are going away? They are, and at the rate they’re sinking, the form they’re in 10 years from now will be hardly recognizeable. No one’s fault, really — it’s called ‘the internet’ and it delivers more information that you really care about in a second than the trusty newspaper could in a week. All the same, it’s too bad. For all their faults, journalists and editors were a kind of watchdog. What we’ll have in their place might be pretty ugly.

First of all, a couple facts, in case you think I’m exaggerating. Newspapers may be a great American institution, but consider what it means to a ANY business when quarterly sales for the past two years look like this:

And when your readership numbers for the past 40 years look like this:

And when most of your readers are 65 and older (HERE).

And when it’s not just a couple of sorry old rags here and there, but behemoths like the New York Times (down 21% since 1993 *) and the San Francisco Chronicle (down 16.4% in six months! **).

And when an ongoing blog called Newspaper Death Watch can hardly keep up with the layoffs and shutdowns, and is trying to guess which major metropolitan daily will be the first to close up shop.

And when it happens again and again and again …

So what’s the upshot to American culture? In a nutshell:

• Diversity of opinion. Which seems like a good thing, except that it also means …
• A dearth of deep and far-flung reporting. Hey, I love my little blog, but I’m no Woodward and/or Bernstein, and societies weren’t built on amateurs like me.
• Increased discourse — one of the problems with newspapers is that the model was based on monologuing, and people wanted to talk over the events of the day. Again, sounds like a good thing, except it also means…
• Decreased civil discourse. With everyone gravitating toward their own spin on the news and preferring that which reinforces a certain worldview, that natural desire to talk over the events of the day quickly becomes a passionate desire to argue over the events of the day, or else to just plain push an opinion as fact and reject all contradictory information.

The lack of civil discourse isn’t just an irritant or another sign that our society is becoming less tolerant and more coarse. As the world’s largest and oldest democratic republic, we need civil discourse. This is still a participatory democracy, and if large segments of the population are being shouted down, ignored or censored, (or even if they just FEEL like they are) the democracy suffers. Disenfranchised people don’t contribute to the society that alienated them.

Besides being detrimental to our social fabric, this disproportionate amount of ‘opinion-as-fact’ information takes its toll on our humanity. If we’re not at least exposed to divergent opinions and worldviews, we will lose the faculties of discernment and critical thinking that are as important to the Church as they are to the world.

And what will happen to all the journalists, editors and journalist majors — these angry, restless agitators who have been fuming away for years in the relative safety of glass buildings and university classes? They’ll be released into the wild, and heaven help us. They’re a passionate bunch, they’re mad as heck, they sincerely believe that America is worse than Nazi Germany … and they’ll be out of a job. Look for many, MANY more articles on the economy not just melting down but downright vaporizing, and many, MANY very persuasive presentations in which the sky is actually, actually falling (film at 11).

Newspapers were once an institution, and were as necessary for our culture and society as the pulpit and the voting box. What will happen in their demise, what havoc they will wreak themselves on the way out, may be another thing altogether.