PRINT IS DEAD - EGON

Nothing we are doing here today is meant in any way to suggest that we don’t believe in the future of print publishing in our other newspaper markets"
-Hearst Corporation CEO Frank Bennack jr

One of the theories behind why the legacy media was so obviously, painfully, and nauseatingly behind Barack Obama in the US presidential election was because they are suffering badly as a business. Network television news shows are steadily losing viewers and ratings, newspapers are losing advertisers and circulation, and news magazines are losing subscribers. The idea is that legacy media outlets saw not just a Democrat who could win, but a leftist who might help the newspapers survive with legislation and executive orders.

And for these businesses, things are getting very dire. For almost a decade, newspapers have been seeing their finances suffer and crash. In the last few weeks in particular there have been three stories of newspapers that are on the verge of collapse: three major, old newspapers.

The first is the Chicago Tribune which is looking at a bankruptcy filing. In 2007 the paper was doing so poorly that it bought all the stocks and went private. Now it is so saddled with debt and loss of business, it fold entirely. The Tribune already has sold off many of its assets to stay afloat, such as the Chicago Cubs, but it just cannot make the money it needs to survive.

Like the Tribune, the New York Times is looking at bankruptcy. They are selling off assets as well, which include the Boston Red Sox, About.com, and the Boston Globe. Some say they are looking to go private as well, since the stock value has plunged and they are considered a poor investment - it has been classified as "junk" stock. So far the paper's family owners have been kept happy with exorbitant stock dividends that far exceed or even defy the paper's performance in stocks. Yet some are saying the Times might go bankrupt as soon as this May.

Meanwhile, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the biggest and oldest newspaper in the Northwest is up for sale. Losing over 14 million dollars in 2008, the P-I almost collapsed in the early 1980s but was kept in business by an agreement with the Hearst corporation. For more than a decade, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has been suffering losses, and it has gotten to the point that they just cannot continue any longer. The paper might become online-only, or it might simply vanish, leaving the Seattle Times (also losing money) as the only area newspaper.

WHY?
One reason for the woes newspapers are suffering is the rise of internet advertising. Craig's List, for example, gives anyone who wants an ad space the advertising for free. Why pay the New York Times for ad space when you can reach anyone in the world for free? Yet the loss of classified ad revenues hardly explain why other advertisers are leaving newspapers, even if it is the pet excuse of the New York Times at present.

Circulation and sales of news has all dropped since 2000, when it reached a high point. As far back as 2005 it was discovered that newspapers were overestimating - lying about - their circulation numbers. They claimed that they had more readers than they really did. As the probe into these false claims were widened, it was discovered that many, not a few newspapers were involved in falsifying their circulation data, including some of the biggest papers in the country. Trying to adapt to this loss of sales, papers began to cut back on their expenses, dropping foreign reporters and relying more heavily on "stringers" who are local people in an area who turn in stories and images for the paper to use. More on those in a moment.

As the troubles continued, staff was cut, dropping reporters and other workers to become more lean and less costly to run. News shows on network television are doing so poorly as their audience ages and dies off that the CBS news department is facing possible elimination so that CBS can just run a feed from CNN in that time slot. Even the election didn't drive people to their television sets to watch the news, as Matt Drudge reports:

CBSNEWS w/ Couric shed a half a million viewers, falling from 6.4 million to 5.9 million; ABCNEWS dropped from 8.1 million to 7.6 million; NBCNEWS slumped from 8.2 million to 7.8 million.

As the revenues in news companies falls, their ability and desire to purchase costly reporting from organizations such as the Associated Press also dwindles. Thus, these news feeds are suffering financial problems as well, and are cutting costs. CNBC reported in December that revenues across the board have all suffered:

The news about newspapers just keeps getting worse and worse. The Newspaper Association of America reports that newspaper ad revenue fell nearly $2 billion in the third quarter -- a record 18.1 percent decline.

It was all the expected culprits: newspapers' biggest category, retail, suffered an 11.7 percent drop. Classified ads dropped 30.9 percent, much of those ads likely moving online to the likes of Craigslist. And while local ads have suffered the most, even national ads took a hit-- that category down 18.4 percent in the quarter.

Newspapers are counting on online ads to be their future, but even that great white hope disappointed this past quarter. Online newspaper ads dropped 3 percent in the third quarter after falling 2.4 percent in the second quarter.

Now news outfits like the Denver Post are trying to renegotiate union contracts as they watch their business slump into the red like a horseshoe salesman in 1920. The outlook is incredibly dire in the entire industry, except for a very few bright spots such as the New York Post, which is more famous for witty and clever headlines than hardcore reporting.

COMPETITION
Why? Why are these newspapers dying? Well the first and most obvious answer is that they are a past innovation that the public is moving away from. When a technology or business becomes obsolete, they tend to do very poorly (the buggy whip is usually brought up in this context: when automobiles showed up, people stopped buying horse drawn vehicles and the industry collapsed). Younger people especially can't imagine buying a newspaper or watching a television news story when they can get the news as it happens, with video and sound, from the place it happens, in real time or very close to it. Why get a newspaper that's a day old when you can surf the web and watch it happen, then read 50 analyses and opinions about the event?

Increasingly, people simply do not turn to traditional news sources such as network news shows or newspapers for their information. Finance guru Henry Blodget explains what happened:

As discussed earlier here, newspapers did a brilliant job of ramping their sales smoothly throughout the 1990s by boosting ad rates at will. Those remarkably consistent and predictable sales gains were derailed by the arrival of Internet and other disruptive, new technologies that give readers and advertisers unprecedented media alternatives.

Seemingly dumbfounded by the arrival of serious competition for their audiences and advertising revenues, newspapers have been struggling for more than a decade, with meager success, to regain their relevance and economic vitality.

ARROGANCE
Which brings us to the next reason: arrogance. Newspapers became complacent and arrogant, presuming they had a permanent audience and could shape and present the news however they saw fit. One famous example is the Seattle P-I, now in total collapse. David Mumber, the News editor at the paper responded to criticism with this line: "I understand that people have a hard time with the concept that we get to decide what is news and what isn't, and what is fair and what isn't."

That's not a man seeking to please customers or produce the best work possible, it is a man who wants to shape opinion, culture, and control the flow of information. And he's hardly alone in the news business. That arrogance shows its self regularly with a condescension toward anyone who dares to disagree with the urban elite on culture or politics and reporting on areas and people that they are unfamiliar with. one more recent example is an attempt to show what "Ugly Americans" are like abroad with ABC hiring stunt tourists - actors - to be as obnoxious, political, ugly, and unpleasant as possible, then reporting that surprise! The locals did not care for them.

The attitude of the newspapers is that of a lofty, enlightened, all-knowing emperor while the masses beneath them are not to be consulted or pleased, merely dictated to. The response of journalists to bloggers is a good example of this: disdain, insult, spite, and contempt. How dare someone try to do the vastly complex, nigh-impossible work of asking questions and accurately reporting what happened? Only someone of such transcendent skill and training as a reporter could attempt such a thing!

This attitude can be felt, especially since 2000 as news organizations became more and more transparently political and tilted toward certain conclusions. Coincidentally, the latest business struggles began about that time as well.

BIAS
And that brings us to the next reason. As I wrote in 2006, bias can happen for a lot of reasons and a reporter can appear to be biased when it is not. Yet sometimes the real thing is there, and in the last ten years it has become increasingly obvious. This is probably not a big reason for people to abandon legacy media sources, but it was one more push on the lever to tip people away. Those who disagreed politically or culturally saw these news sources become more plainly hostile to their viewpoint and sympathetic toward what they disliked. Those who were indifferent began seeing a tilt that they perhaps hadn't noticed, or were willing to tolerate earlier. Particularly this last election campaign the tilt became so blatant it was practically vertical. To a certain degree it is impossible to avoid one's personal viewpoints from influencing their writing, but the legacy media has passed that point long ago.

INCOMPETENCE
Yet not every example that seems to be bias is actually deliberate or unintentional slanting of news coverage. Sometimes it is just being lousy at your job, or gullible because you don't know any better. Some topics such as science, religion, military, and American culture most reporters have almost no familiarity with and the result is not surprising. Stories either have sad errors, exaggerated conclusions, odd mistakes, and generally the effects of trying to explain things you know nothing about.

This incompetence can take other forms as well, sometimes reporters are simply not any good at their job or just steal writing to save them time. Errors such as mocking Governor Palin for saying that Maliki and Talibani were working toward victory in Iraq - thinking she meant Talibani (the Taliban in Afghanistan) rather than Iraq president Talabani, or the infamous times that liars and false soldiers such as Jesse MacBeth were taken so seriously and reported supportively by the legacy media.

Then there are the stringers. As I mentioned above, "stringers" are local people who report and send in images to news organizations on the cheap, saving money so that they do not have to run a foreign bureau and pay for reporters to live and work in another country. The problem is that in some areas the stringers are little more than propagandists for the enemy. When the Israel-Lebanon war broke out, the stringers took this kind of reporting to new lows, producing absurdly falsified "fauxtography," staged events (the same thing is happening now as Israel wipes out the terrorists in Gaza), and outrageously slanted "reporting." This kind of reporting was routine out of Iraq, such as an old woman holding up unfired bullets that supposedly went through her wall from evil coalition soldiers.

Stringers allow the legacy media to produce news cheaply, but the editorial process is so sloppy - or deliberately uninterested in editing - that the most absurd bias and sad lies are reported boldly and confidently in major news sources. The result is that the quality of news suffers, the scandals and mockery of news organizations broadens, and people start looking for other places to get their news.

DOOM
Yet perhaps the most important facet of news reporting that is not considered is their own reporting on the economy. For eight years we've been told that the economy is doomed, that we were in horrible shape, that we all were doing terrible and that people were struggling to get by. We were assured that no matter what good news came out about the economy, it really wasn't all that good, and besides the Bush administration was probably lying about it anyway.

Now that the economy is starting a downward dive - caused in great part by policies and financial decisions these news businesses supported, pushed for, and even still defend - people are being told that we're facing a new great depression. Barack Obama is claiming that this is the worst economic situation since the depression (conveniently ignoring the far worse Carter economy).

Now, faced with that constant bombardment, would you really spend your extra cash on a newspaper, or news magazine? Would you really even want to watch the news? Why not turn the channel to something more cheery, or something more entertaining? In a sense, the legacy media, in its never ending quest to crush Republicans and discredit President Bush has cut its own throat. Small wonder that the calls for a newspaper bailout have begun. They're too big to fail.

CONCLUSION
Now, at this point, you might think that I'm glad to see this, that it is some sort of vindication for my viewpoint, a just result of the bias and incompetence I rail against on my blog. As a conservative, my viewpoint is constantly under assault by the legacy media, a target of contempt, hatred, and even fear. Yet that isn't so.

I don't want news organizations to collapse. I don't want to see old institutions like the New York Times fail. I want them to succeed, I just want them to do their job. News reporting is critical for the survival of any democracy, they act as a sort of check against excesses by government when they function properly. They report on corruption, unmask misuse of power, and highlight the people and issues we are voting on so that we can do so more intelligently and better informed.

It is when the legacy media fails to do this - or worse, as recently, when they instead act as a state official organ to produce the party line for the Democratic Party - that they fail us in their job as the "fourth estate." That is what I want to die, that slanted, idiot's version of reporting, no the concept of the news. We need news reporting in a free country, and the fact that these businesses are collapsing does not sound a bell of triumph or schadenfreude for me.

As a blogger, I rely on news organizations heavily. I write about events, cultural trends, news, and entertainment based on what I can find and study online. Without the reporters pounding the streets, without the organizations printing and publishing the news, I cannot do my job of analysis and reporting. Blogs and News organizations may hate each other, but blogs are parasitical on legacy media: without the media to give them news, blogs would all turn into a personal journal. I ate corn flakes today, and one of them was burnt. My kid said "daddy" the first time. I stubbed my toe.

So in a very real sense, all bloggers want the news to survive. None of us should cheer or welcome the collapse of major news organizations, nor want them to vanish.

At the same time, one of the founding, golden principles of US government - a concept many later nations built upon - is the idea of checks and balances between the branches of government. Each branch has only so much power and no more, while they can act to limit each other's power and actions. The fourth "estate" which is a non-official branch of government is the news media. Acting as a check and balance against all three, it is constitutionally protected from reprisal by the government and is its self nearly free of any checks and balances. For over a century, newspapers and later news sources were free to print and act as they chose without any manner of opposition other than other newspapers. Eventually almost all of them ended up with the same political viewpoint, and the few exceptions were only slightly opposed.

The one real check on news reporting is the consumer. Stop buying their product and they collapse. If they go too far, fail to do their job, become a cheerleader for one side or the other, the only response is to cut off their source of income and they die. And that is what is happening now. People are just not buying the old media - that's why I call it "legacy" media - as much any more and they're crumbling under their own preposterous weight.

I want to see news organizations like the New York Times be less arrogant, less pretentious, and less biased, but still in business. I want people to take that network, those connections, those resources, and that prestige and turn it into a good newspaper again. One that digs into the bad guys no matter what party they are part of. One that reports the news, no matter who it upsets or hurts. One that finds out the facts and reports them objectively, factually, and wisely with a dignity and honor toward the nation they live in. one that doesn't believe somehow that it must work against national interest as if it were a noble endeavor.

With real reporting, good, hard hitting reporting that yet understood the responsibility toward community and the nation as a whole, we could see a resurgence of interest in these old news organizations. They would have to accept being leaner, less wealthy and powerful, and more old fashioned, but they could still survive. There are still people shoeing horses and making buggy whips too. They just don't rule the roost any more.

We need that reporting, not just bloggers who survive on it, but voters and citizens who learn from it. We need the reporter who tears down Tammany Hall and reports on Watergate. We need the journalist who writes the facts and only what he can prove rather than opinions and what he feels to be true. We need news organizations who are skeptical of power, the common opinion, and the conventionally assumed. When we get those back, we'll all be better for it.

I just fear that the only way to get there is through the ashes and ruins of what was once news reporting in America.