Newspapers Grasp For Relevancy
(Nov 10, 2008) I happened on Alan D. Mutter’s piece “It’s time Tappet Brothers.)
Mutter’s theory is that the huge sales of “Obama Wins” newspapers (purchased for memorabilia purposes) prove that there is breath left in the corpse. All it really takes, he opines, is a return to real muck-raking journalism. The fight for social justice, as executed by investigative journalists, is the key to a vibrant future for the dinosaurs.
“All but the most aggressively down-sized paper can generate excitement on a day-to-day basis by practing (sic) the sort of muscular, crusading journalism that afflicts the comfortable and comforts the afflicted by kicking over rocks, exposing social injustice and holding public officials and corporate leaders to account.”
In military circles, this is known as fighting the last war.
Most of the people who claim to know what’s best for the dying big-media news industry point to the heroic days when news wasn’t “infotainment”. The concurrence of populist alignment and revenue decline is typically mistaken as causal. The hidden argument is that the competition between news sources for attention resulted in a quality decline which drove circulation losses.
You’ve got to wonder if this guy has ever really watched Jon Stewart.
Old media, newspapers in particular really do have an important place in the new media ecosystem, On that point, we are in agreement. Representative digging, the hard work and fun stuff of journalism, is a long way away from the right direction, however.
Newspapers can be the economic centerpieces of the regions in which they operate. For a period of time, this idea was central to the way that the Washington Post approached its web transition. The newspaper can be the platform on which much is built.
You just can’t get there when the audience is the source of your misery. “Circulation declines” means that the current material is not competitive with the alternatives. While industry analysts can and should characterize the problem in these objective sounding terms, the truth is that this is a “failure to connect”. Where “circulation decline” lays the blame on the audience (and outside of the industry ), “failure to connect” is responsible ownership of the problem.
When classified advertising is the centerpiece of the newspaper’s economic strategy, things are different. If the object of the operation is to energize enough buyers and sellers so that they interact effectively with each other, the business model stands a chance. If the gambit is “be really smart” and hope that it’s enough (which is what you do when you focus on journalism), it’s a long shot.
Way before there was investigative journalism, there was people talking to each other through the medium of their town’s newspaper. Political advocacy and moral posturing are the luxuries of successful businesses, not the plans of startups. The approach Mutter suggests is like saying that the way to reclaim the family fortune is by rejoining the hoity-toity country club.
(interestingly, Steve Outing reacted to the same piece, same quote and delivered a different view)
