Don’t print the obit just yet

“So, you’ve been over into Russia,” Bernard Baruch said to the muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens, recently returned from a fact-finding trip to the new Soviet Union.

“I have been over into the future,” Steffens replied, “and it works.”

Eighty-four years have passed since that famous exchange, but it perfectly encapsulates the smug certainty that still intoxicates Americans who think they’re on to the next big thing. In part, it’s a matter of our reflexive faith in the benefits of progress; in part, a consequence of our unquenchable optimism. There’s just something about the future that makes some among us giddy.

In fact, giddy doesn’t quite begin to describe the reaction in some quarters to this week’s news that the long-term decline in the number of American newspaper readers accelerated during the last reporting period. The fall was particularly sharp among Los Angeles Times readers, whose numbers dropped 6.5% Monday through Saturday and 7.9% on Sunday. No sane person who hopes to go on making a living out of newspaper journalism is going to laugh off numbers like that. They’re a clear challenge to newspaper promotion and circulation departments and -- in more subtle and complex ways -- to editors and reporters, as well.

But are they really, as the new media triumphalists would have it, the latest and longest nail in the coffin of mainstream news media in general and newspapers in particular? To borrow New York University journalism professor and blogger Jay Rosen’s provocative formulation, has the time come for “laying the newspaper gently down to die?”

No, but here’s where we lose a certain number of the new media propagandists because we’re about to bring up the past. (Wait guys, don’t go ... don’t think of it as history, but as a whole series of previously realized futures. See, we can get along.)

The notion that the advent of new communication technologies -- in this case digitalization and the Web -- inevitably spells oblivion for other media has no basis in experience. Just look around:

A lot has happened since Gutenberg set the Bible into type, but printed books still are purchased in the millions. Film was supposed to kill the novel. Tell that to Philip Roth. Television was supposed to eliminate movie theaters. Check out your local multiplex tonight. Radio and, later, TV were supposed to make newspapers and magazines obsolete. In fact, while broadcast journalism did contribute to the death of afternoon newspapers, the print media’s ambition and quality rose exponentially after the advent of network news, though it’s true that the overall number of outlets declined. Around the world, hundreds of millions of dollars still are being spent on fax machines -- a “regressive” technology if ever there was one, since there’s no real need to exchange paper documents in a digitalized world. There even are companies making handsome profits selling fountain pens to people with wireless keyboards.

Why, then, this rush to bury newspapers?

At the moment, you’ve basically got three groups who are busily organizing a wake without a corpse.

First are the ideologically minded commentators -- mostly right wing, a handful on the left -- who have found a congenial home in the blogosphere. Their critique is basically an exercise in wishful thinking. They want newspapers to die because their editors just won’t print the news they want in the language they demand. These folks see the world through utterly polarized lenses and don’t believe any other view is possible.

Second are the academics for whom migration from one novelty to another has become a kind of career path. For them, the death of newspapers is the next new thing, something to be endlessly parsed and conferred over -- until the next new thing comes along. This is the world in which new criticism gives way to semiotics, which gives way to deconstruction, which ... well, you get the point. Does anyone remember communitarism and civic journalism? No? Well, they were the last flavor of the month, and let’s not go there.

Finally, there are demoralized newspaper proprietors themselves, though we employ the term loosely, since nowadays a majority of them are corporate apparatchiks. They are essentially creatures of the herd, oddly wary and complacent in the manner of sheep. They are easily alarmed and tend to gang together and infect one another with anxiety. They bear a heavy responsibility for newspaper journalism’s current difficulties. For more than a decade many of them -- like their counterparts in broadcast news -- have acquiesced in endless rounds of cost-cutting. In fact, to an extent probably impossible to determine, the most recent declines in newspaper readership may be, in some large part, a consequence of excessive cuts in promotion and circulation budgets across the industry over the last five years.

Like any other business -- and perhaps more than in most -- a healthy news media company requires steady and substantial reinvestment. Somewhere along the line, corporate media executives have lost sight of that fact and allowed themselves to be demoralized by their own lack of creativity. It’s impossible to recall how many times over these last few years we’ve heard one of them cite the infamous Harvard Business School case study on why the railroads “failed,” while other executives nodded sagely.

The bottom line, according to this argument: They failed because they thought they were in the railroad business and forgot they were in the transportation business.

Yeah, yeah. But the fact is that railroads didn’t vanish. They changed, and today they’re an indispensable part of the American economy and rolling up very nice profits for their owners.

The notion that print newspapers won’t find ways to adapt, absorb and adjust to the Internet and other new media is as narrow and ahistorical as the insistence by some print media fundamentalists that bloggers aren’t journalists and are not entitled to 1st Amendment protections.

In fact, bloggers are opinion journalists in the same sense that op-ed commentators are -- and every bit as entitled to protection. A good case can be made, moreover, that the political speech in which the many of them are engaged is precisely what the Founders intended to protect.

Their numbers and general lack of civility may make that inconvenient, but who said liberty was supposed to be neat or easy? The best guess -- which is what those of us wary of predictions do -- may be that the futures of both newspapers and blogging are linked.

By the time Steffens came to recall his exchange with Baruch for his 1931 “Autobiography,” he had become disenchanted with communism. Our prediction is that when the rest of us go over into the future, we’ll find newspapers in which to read the obituaries of all those now busily composing print’s epitaph.