Will newspapers keep their soul?
Sooner rather than later, the newspaper you’re holding in your hands will be very different than it is today.
A couple of fascinating new studies out this week suggest just how profound -- and potentially troubling -- some of those differences may be.
One of those surveys comes from Britain, where the media research firm Nielsen/NetRatings reports that the online editions of Britain’s two largest “quality” newspapers -- the Guardian and the Times of London -- now have more American than British readers. The Independent, a smaller serious daily, already has twice as many readers in the U.S. as it does in Britain, and, if the current trend holds, even the very Tory Daily Telegraph’s online edition shortly will have more readers in the U.S. than in the Home Counties.
What’s up?
You can’t, of course, entirely exclude the snob factor. It’s the same impulse that drives otherwise intelligent people to spend their evenings watching mediocre detective dramas on public television just because they’re set in London. It’s what drives American men of a certain age and inclination to buy English dress shirts, even though they have no breast pocket.
Still, given the kinds of numbers Nielsen turned up, something else is at work. The quality British papers, particularly in their online editions, are much farther down the road toward what looks like the future of newspaper journalism, one that places a much higher premium on analysis and opinion than do serious American newspapers. When Britain’s former Prime Minister Tony Blair complained in one of his farewell addresses that the British broadsheets had transformed themselves from newspapers to “viewspapers,” Tony O’Reilly, the Irish magnate who owns the Independent newspaper group, proudly agreed, saying it’s what his readers want.
Then there’s a new survey by the reliably nonpartisan Pew Research Center for the People and the Press: Roughly a quarter of Americans now use the Internet as their primary news source. Pew’s study finds that the Web crowd is younger and better educated than most Americans and far more dissatisfied with their country’s news media. It’s fair to assume that a substantial number of them are among the British papers’ U.S. readers, people who want a “viewspaper.”
There’s something else about their reading habits worth considering. As Joseph Epstein, a commentator of generally conservative predilections, points out in a forthcoming essay on the future of newspapers: “Not only are we acquiring our information from new places but we are taking it pretty much on our own terms. The magazine Wired recently defined the word ‘egocasting’ as ‘the consumption of on-demand music, movies, television and other media that cater to individual and not mass-market tastes.’ The news, too, is now getting to be on-demand.”
Pew has been polling on public attitudes toward the news media since 1985, when it was the Times Mirror Center, so its surveys are among the most useful for charting trends in this area. Although Pew’s most recent study finds the percentage of Americans who think the press is inaccurate or biased has grown over the last 20 years, the younger, better-educated, Internet-reliant readers have a view more skeptical than most. That’s one of Pew’s interesting findings; the other is this:
“Opinions about the news media have grown much more partisan, particularly over the past decade. Far more than twice as many Republicans as Democrats say news organizations are too critical of America (63% vs. 23%). There is virtually no measure of press performance on which there is not a substantial gap in the views of political partisans. . .
“While Republicans generally are much more critical of the press than are Democrats, Republicans who rely on Fox News as their main news source have an even less favorable opinion of the press than do other Republicans. Fully 71% of Republicans who list Fox as their main news source hold an unfavorable opinion of major national newspapers, compared with 52% of Republicans who use other sources and 33% of those who are not Republicans.”
That may not be too surprising, but this finding is: “As many as 38% of those who rely mostly on the Internet for news [those younger, better-educated readers] say they have an unfavorable opinion of cable news networks, such as CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, compared with 25% of the public overall and just 17% of television news viewers.”
In other words, although the younger and better-educated consumers of serious news may be hungry for more analysis and interpretation, they’re increasingly turned off not only by Fox’s partisanship but also by CNN’s and MSNBC’s opportunistic attempts to match the ratings success of Rupert Murdoch’s network. It’s clear all three cable networks, whatever their politics, have decided it’s anger that sells in their medium, and that’s where they’ve settled. Thus we have right-wing anger (Fox’s Bill O’Reilly), left-wing anger (MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann), faux-populist anger (CNN’s Lou Dobbs) and crypto-fascist rage (Headline’s Nancy Grace).
So, we’re back to where we started: Sooner rather than later, the newspaper you’re holding in your hands will be very different from what it is today.
Different in what way is the fair and obvious question.
The honest answer is that nobody knows for certain, but the odds are it will be a hybrid publication in which an online edition that’s focused mainly on breaking news and service works in tandem with a print edition whose staples are analysis, context and opinion. The former almost surely will have a lot more video and interactivity than it does today; the latter will have to be much more thoughtful and far more intensely and carefully edited.
It’s a difficult -- though not impossible -- transition, and the scandal of cable news’ failed transformation provides a cautionary example. As Fox and CNN demonstrate to the rest of the news media, it’s possible to save your financial skin and forfeit any claim on respect. It’s an old problem. Saul of Tarsus, a one-time tentmaker whose letters made him a kind of media celebrity two millenniums ago, put it plainly: “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”
So how do American newspapers manage this passage while holding on to their “souls” -- that sense that they are, uniquely, businesses worthy of constitutional protection because their bottom line reckons service to the common good alongside profit and loss?
One way is to maintain the serious news media’s postwar tradition of nonpartisan journalism, leaving advocacy to the editorial pages. As they give themselves over to more analysis and commentary, newspapers will have to be more vigilant about being genuinely honest brokers of ideas, opening their news columns to a far broader spectrum of serious opinions and perspectives -- liberal to conservative -- than even the best of them do now. Politicization is the enemy rather than the logical consequence of that process. Newspapers can distinguish themselves from the current undifferentiated cacophony of substantial and frivolous opinion on the Internet -- and best serve their readers -- by insisting that their analysis and commentary conform to the discernible facts. In a society that seems more deeply and reflexively divided along partisan lines, that would be more than a service.
As the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was fond of saying: “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not to their own facts.”
Simply surviving the current turmoil isn’t enough. In 1860, on the eve of Civil War, Americans were -- on a per capita basis -- the world’s greatest newspaper readers. The country was hip deep in partisan broadsheets and news weeklies only too happy to encourage their readers to slaughter and despoil one another, and so they did.
That’s a thought for the people who run our serious news organizations to keep in mind, because it’s increasingly clear that, if your only concern is profiting yourself, you easily can contrive a solution that makes you part of the problem.
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