Why America’s Newspapers are Dying
Why America’s Newspapers are Dying
It isn’t Faux News, or lack of pulp trees
© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
2/11/07
http://www.mytown.ca/zepp
McClatchy Newspapers, second largest chain of papers in the US and
owners of California’s Bee newspapers, was bemoaning the fact that their
stock had slipped nearly 40%. They mentioned lack of advertising
revenue, dropping circulation, and increasing costs of production as the
problem, but the basic situation goes beyond that.
Newspapers love to cite cable news stations for all that has gone wrong
in journalism over the past 35 years since the glory days of the
Watergate scandal. But “Spin,” the brilliant CBC series, mentioned today
the “dirty little secret” about cable news: they aren’t that popular,
and their influence, such as it is, exists only because they insist they
are influential. America’s most popular news cable station is Faux News,
and on a good day, it gets one out of every two hundred Americans to
watch. And while that viewership includes the administration and movers
and shakers in the GOP, the typical Faux viewer is near or past
retirement, annoyed that minorities are moving into the neighborhood,
and thinks the world’s been going to hell since 1960. Grandpa Simpson
with a whiskey bottle.
The New York Times has substantially more reach, even just inside New
York City. And their influence extends far beyond that. Even in these
days, more people read the New York Times – or many other major
metropolitan papers – than watch Faux News.
In other words, were it not for the fact that the GOP had been co-opted
by its lunatic wing, Faux News would have all the influence of the
Weekly World News, or National Enquirer, and for much the same reasons.
Cable News also shorted the news cycle from 24 hours to one ½ hour, and
papers complain that they can’t compete with that, but try anyway with
the same sloppy, superficial, rushed journalism that afflicts even the
cable stations that aren’t there simply as propaganda organs.
USA Today, back in the eighties, came up with the flashy, bright
newspaper with lots of color and illustrations and not a whole heck of a
lot of content. It was a commercial success, and other newspapers
followed suit, imagining that their news content should match their
target demographic – superficial and dim-witted.
Appealing to morons frequently pays off, since there’s never a shortage
of morons. The main problem is that morons don’t read. Some can’t, and
the rest won’t – they think that reading is for the intellectually
pretentious and sissies. It’s a major reason why the rest of the world
regards the typical American as a shambling idiot who can’t find
Australia on the map. (A guerrilla theater group made a strong case for
this on You Tube with a painfully hilarious video of Americans pointing
to Australia as a potential military threat such as North Korea or Iran,
simply because the word “Australia” had been removed from the island
continent and the name of another country substituted).
Newspapers are damning themselves by targeting the elderly and the
somewhat dimwitted. This has alienated a lot of readers who prefer
substance (and it shows in that more Americans read the London
Guardian’s online edition than Brits) while picking up only a handful of
morons who are almost certain that Canada is the one that’s shaped like
a boot.
While not as bad as television and far less so than commercial radio,
newspapers are heading for an advertising event horizon, in which the
amount of advertising might someday surpass the actual physical
dimensions of the newspaper. Advertisers want ever more space for less
and less money, and worse, are constantly leaning on newspapers to
temper their coverage so as to not offend customers. Their customers,
not the newspaper’s. The only time they care about the actual readers is
when they see the circulation numbers have slipped, and demand a
corresponding reduction in rates for their ads. And ignore any
suggestions that some people quit subscribing because they got tired of
leafing through four pages of ads to find a “continued on” section of
two paragraphs. Even advertisers are realizing that people have reached
a saturation point on advertising and are fed up.
The self-subornation of the media for purposes of not upsetting the
readers or the advertisers has done much damage to newspapers, even
though they are usually much better than Faux News. When people think of
the New York Times these days, they don’t think of the paper taking a
courageous first Amendment stand in order to publish the Ellsberg
Papers; they think of Judith Miller’s craven first Amendment stand to
cheerlead for the government and help Putsch lie the country into a
bloody and pointless occupation. They remember the New York Times
headline that lied about the findings on the Florida 2000 election. And
Faux News, cynically and dishonestly, is anxious to remind the world of
Jayson Blair forever. I don’t read the New York Times because I trust
it; I read it to see what the corporations are thinking.
That they are far more trustworthy than cable news doesn’t matter; the
slime from them rubs off on the Times, above and beyond their own
self-inflicted injuries.
However, the final nail in the coffin of newspapers might be found in a
curious location: the comics page. I have a Sacramento Bee here, and
they have what many regard as the best comics collection among US
dailies, a full double-page spread. Thirty two strips or panels in all.
Of that thirty two, only four got picked up this century. Twenty one of
them were around in the eighties. Nine of them were around in the
sixties, and there’s several where the original creator died, and the
strip got taken over, usually by a family member, or, in the case of
Peanuts, they are simply recycling strips dating back to the 50s.
(Fortunately, Peanuts isn’t the sort of strip to have jokes about
President Eisenhower’s golf game). I’m quite sure the Sacramento Bee
would like to get rid of those relics and get strips that can opine on
Blackberries and Ipods, but it’s not that easy. Last year, they dumped
the painfully inept “Mark Trail,” and there was a huge outcry from Loyal
Readers and the paper hurriedly put it back, knowing that far more
people detested the strip, but unwilling to alienate a vocal minority
and lose yet more revenue.
So you have all these hopelessly dated, mediocre comic strips, and even
the more modern ones tend to be targeted more to adults, and come with
sly “aren’t we just too most-podern for words” winks.
I got my start reading newspapers when I was five, and I started on the
comics page. Gasoline Alley, Alley Oop, L’il Abner, Dick Tracy. Pogo.
Most of them had some sort of appeal to a modern kid, and it was only a
matter of time before I started exploring the rest of the paper, and
discovered that they had whole pages devoted to my favorite hockey team,
or why dad hated Diefenbaker so much. From Dick Tracy, I evolved into a
newspaper reader.
There’s precious little in the comics page to appeal to kids. Indeed,
the comics, more and more, are geared to pretty much the same
demographic as Faux News – Grandpa Simpson with a whiskey bottle. It
both reflects the greying of newspaper readership and exacerbates it.
It may be that comics themselves are obsolete, supplanted by YouTube and
MySpace. I don’t know. In that case, the situation is without remedy
until societal tastes, always fickle and cyclical, come back around
again to the printed page, or at least static images on a screen.
But when newspapers target the dumb, the superficial, and the
rapidly-aging who are morbidly clinging to their childhoods, this
doesn’t suggest a rosy future.