By Colby Itkowitz
It’s the classic picture perfect scene. Before the nine-to-five workday officially begins, you sit down at the kitchen table with a cup of freshly brewed coffee and the morning newspaper. Often you even fold the paper under your arm and continue reading on the subway, at the office and on your lunch break. There’s nostalgia connected to holding the print in your hands, flipping the pages and reading what’s of your interest. There’s no anchor dissecting the news to decide for you what’s important, no pop-up ads on the computer screen or commercial breaks between broadcasts. A bit archaic in theory, newspapers remain the symbolism of true journalism and it holds at its core the foundation for what all newsmaking is modeled.
Yet it is also dying.
Recent studies conclude that the public’s dependency on newspapers is steadily declining. According to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the percentage of people who regularly read a weekday newspaper has decreased by more than 20 percentage points since 1977. The biggest culprits are18-to-24-year olds who spend an average time of only 20 minutes reading their daily newspaper over the course of a week.
You can point fingers at the growing webblog trend among 20-somethings or free newspaper access online where a reader can chose by headlines which stories to read from outlets around the world. It’s globalization at its best and its forcing the newspaper business to cut back, consolidate and merge with umbrella corporations just to stay competitive.
Newsday, once a family-owned Long Island treasure, joined a drove of nationwide publications in 2000 under Tribune Company, a huge media conglomerate responsible for 11 daily papers, 22 major TV stations and a range of magazines. On Monday, Tribune announced that by 2006 all of its papers’ Washington bureaus would merge, resulting in a possible 200 lost jobs across the board in the nation’s capital and the home offices.
Tribune Publishing president, Jack Fuller said in a statement, “The purpose of the restructuring is to minimize repetition in editorial coverage, increase the communication and cooperation among our newspapers and reduce expenses.”
In the wake of Newsday’s own circulation scandals this summer, their bureau is being hardest hit. Political reporting legends, whose names resonate throughout the winding halls of Congress among legislators, press assistants and lobbyists could be let go – unneeded and possessing too much journalistic clout.
The editor at Newsday asked me if it was too late for me to change majors, another reporter encouraged law school and a fellow intern said, “well there’s always public relations.” The general consensus-the newspaper business is an endangered species.
Newspapers are no longer interested in servicing the people. They’ve replaced editorially trained publishers with advertising fat cats, give more consideration to the placement of ads than news stories and have lost the local edge that once connected a community. Just the mere notion of conglomeration undermines the ability for a free press to effectively tell a wide-range of stories. Journalism, in effect, is now just a mass production factory.
Norman Solomon, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, said in a column about Tribune, “There’s no doubt that the drive of media conglomerates toward monopolization is depleting the civic value of newspapers.”
With the simplicity of Internet news sources and anchors telling you what is news in short sound bites, a person can stay well-informed without ever having to pick up a newspaper. They can maintain conversations at cocktail parties and even debate political issues without really engaging themselves in the news.
A newspaper, like no other medium, has the ability to take a story and capture all possible angles and sides, coupled with photographs and now graphics to provide a comprehensive and complete look at a story. But for so many today, reading the newspaper is just an unwanted hassle taking too much time and effort in an otherwise fast paced existence.
It’s sad. Not just for me who has newspaper reporting streaming through her veins or the many hardworking Newsday reporters who will likely lose their jobs, but for society as a whole to be moving toward such a sterile and unequivocally lesser form of journalism.