The popularity of online news sites and weblogs (such as this one) is part of an Internet news explosion. But it’s also symptomatic of a truth, NPR’s Dick Meyer points out: there now “more news, but less news” because a lot of what passes for news now consists of people talking about the news.
Meyer, the former CBS staffer who has a new book coming out today, takes a look at the realities of early 21st century news and the organizations that have traditionally provided it in an NPR column that deserves to be read in its entirety by TMV readers and anyone interested in the news biz. Let’s take a look at some key highlights.
One of Meyer’s key points is this:
It is important to differentiate between “news gathering” and “news product.” Investors like news product; they dislike news gathering. The sheer quantity of news gathering done by American journalists is shrinking. The amount of news product is growing.
And, as Meyer notes, just look at the context: there has been a spate of newspaper stories about cutbacks on major newspapers, word that a big city newspaper is up for sale and indications that it isn’t easy to sell newspapers anymore.
The news business is shrinking, and shrinking fast. The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune are just three of the many metropolitan dailies that are cutting newsroom staffs dramatically. The news divisions of the television networks have been in steady decline for years. Commercial news radio is getting scarce. Cable networks hire more hosts than reporters.
Meanwhile, it was recently announced that my alma mater the San Diego Union-Tribune is up for sale. This followed the closure of the evening Tribune in the early 90s, spurts of buyouts and layoffs over the years and constant rumors that the paper would never be sold.
Publisher Helen Copley died and left the paper to her son David. When news reports surfaced recently that David Copley was donating millions of dollars to a university for a chair in theatrical make up design, eyebrows went up more than ever. Some present and former staffers got bad vibes – which proved to be true.
How bad is the situation with America’s newspapers? I’m on an 8 week journey doing 8 events in three states in my other incarnation and newspapers are often Missing In Action at local convenience stores, restaurants and hotels where you USED to see them. And now when you see them they’re often so thin and bland in content you wonder how anyone can buy most of them.
Which an increasingly large number of people aren’t.
Yet, as Meyer points out, there is more NEWS around than ever “depending on how you define news…”:
Thirty years ago, there was no cable. Now, there are three all-news cable channels, three business news channels and scads of entertainment, religious and sports channels. That’s more news, right?
Fifteen years ago, there were no online news sites like this one. Now they are uncountable, available on demand 24-7, with instant, easy-to-produce news from every corner of the planet. That’s more news, right?
Wrong…..
And here’s why:
It is important to differentiate between “news gathering” and “news product.” Investors like news product; they dislike news gathering. The sheer quantity of news gathering done by American journalists is shrinking. The amount of news product is growing.
He points to the latest report from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, titled “The Changing Newsroom: Gains and Losses in Today’s Papers.”
Among larger papers, 85 percent are cutting back on newsroom staff. The coverage areas being hit hardest are foreign, national and business news.
But there’s a twist.
“Despite an image of decline, more people today in more places read the content produced in the newsrooms of American daily newspapers than at any time in years,” the report says. “But revenues are tumbling.”
More people are reading the “content” because it is available free online, anywhere, anytime. That’s a good thing.
Or is it? For one thing, how much of the online news content is actually FACT-BASED journalism as opposed to opinion-op ed journalism?
And has online journalism – even non-fact-based online journalism – proven to be either a goldmine for bottom-line corporate journalism bigwigs, or even an even-trade revenue replacement? The answers NO…and NO:
But news online doesn’t make serious money, at least not yet. It certainly isn’t generating enough new revenue to replace the money papers and networks are losing on news. And if online news sites had to actually gather the news they publish instead of retooling material from the wires, newspapers and networks, they would be dead in their tracks.
A pure free-marketer would say this: Since news consumers are increasingly less willing to pay for news or endure advertising in exchange for news, there must be diminished demand for news in society, and that is just fine. Consumers should get what they want.
Sadly, I agree with the first part of that.
Let’s summarize Meyer’s conclusions and use them as a take off point:
— News product has been in decreasing demand due to sociological more than economic reasons. News has traditionally satisfied the demand for curiosity and community. But American society is increasingly mobile and communities are “endangered.” Community news is shrinking.
And indeed, you can see the trend if you look at newspaper trends. The late 20th century big push to zone newspapers and the monster competition between the bigger city dailies and the small local newspapers largely ended. The bigger papers now look more local and provincial and the some of the smaller papers you see are now virtual “shoppers” – looking like throw-aways good only to see advertising and get movie times (which you can get online anyway). In fact, to some readers, that’s how many bigger papers look as well….
—The American educational system is decaying and people not only know less about the world but they don’t have the desire to know more. There’s a downside to this in terms of young people getting their online news from news sites and weblogs. Foreign news is often not that plentiful, and on most of the increasingly popular weblogs world news about is often scarce, if existent. If each generation is destined to shape the world when it becomes in charge adults, then what does this say about where news and international news coverage will be 10, 15 or 20 years from now?
And how have the news media responded?
Meyer is too polite to use the words but we aren’t: on balance, the news media have often responded in a way where they gradually surrendered once-cherished values many news managers were taught and proclaimed, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy and giving impetus to what is shaping up as financial and corporate suicide:
The news media respond to this in two ways: first, by supplying more tabloid, celebrity and voyeuristic “stuff” and pretending it is news; second, by processing the news instead of gathering the news and selling advertising on that. On cable television, talking heads argue about the news; they rarely report it. Blogs argue about the news. Web sites run the same stories from The Associated Press.
All this further depresses the demand for old-fashioned news by discrediting the press even more.
And, indeed, it’s always amusing to see weblogs of the right and left attacking the mainstream media and those awful professional reporters and editors (when they see stories they don’t LIKE, that is since the denunciations don’t come if they like a story) because if weblogs cut out all the quotes and references to the mainstream media – in other words, stopped relying on using the work of paid mainstream media reporters, editors and columnists to generate content for their sites – most sites would be boring, thin and have to work a lot harder for readership. The mainstream media gives online sites a shortcut to gaining readership. Meyer again:
There is one school of idealists who think this is great. Boosters of citizen journalism believe mainstream media can’t die soon enough. They believe technology will make every man and woman a reporter. Citizens will rush to a plane crash and upload video to YouTube, blog about it on Facebook and tweet about it on Twitter.
Call me a curmudgeon, but I don’t believe this can or should replace traditional news gathering. It’s hard for citizens to get to war zones, famine sites and White House hallways. But I do hope citizen journalism can enhance journalism and force us to pick up our game.
So the paradox is that there is now more news product and less traditional news.
Is the glass half full or half empty?
To Meyer, it’s half-empty.
In my experience, more is rarely better. Americans consume an extraordinary amount of media in a day, perhaps more media than what used to be called reality. I think more news product is clutter and is alienating. This is a great dilemma and challenge for a newsperson.
I also believe a democracy and an economy increasingly based on communication and information need people who try to gather true facts about important, interesting and distant events. That market seems to disagree.
The hitch here is in the gathering of “true facts.” To many these days, what’s important isn’t reading “true facts”and news stories or columns that may differ from what they already know, it’s getting reaffirmation of what they already know and ignoring, dismissing or discrediting anything may conflict with their current beliefs.
But IS the news media the victim? Hardly.
Talk to young people (as I do in my non-journalistic incarnation) and you’ll find most don’t read newspapers.Most find newspapers BORING. Even comic pages have shrunk and use bland comic strips. Ask most kids if they want to read the comic pages and they’ll look at you as if you asked whether they wanted to be painfully pinched on the cheek by Aunt Tessie. What interest do newspapers have to teenagers? To college students? To twenty somethings?
The answer is that except for sports sections and movie times (TV listings in most papers are now a shadow of what they used to be) there isn’t much.
Yes, traditional print and broadcast journalism has been a victim. But a willing victim that didn’t see the changes fast enough, didn’t adjust to them fast enough, contemptuously dismissed for too long the “new media” and those who are involved in it, and seemed stuck in 20th century perceptions of what readers wanted. The world was becoming iPod; too many newspapers and broadcast companies stayed Victrola.
In its heyday, the news business used to shape what readers felt they wanted from news. Now that has started falling by the wayside – and the result is shrinking news gathering and shrinking fact-based journalism at a time when many seem to want reaffirmation journalism.
Not the best omen for the unfolding 21st century.
But – as the traditional print and broadcast news media has painfully learned – many others will disagree…
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.