Tom Watson

Ink-Stained Retching

For journalists of a certain vintage, these are the days on the digital horizon that were long-feared and yet somehow unanticipated. The newspaper world is slowly asphyxiating, starved for the oxygen of classified advertising and simultaneously kicked in the chest by a massive recession that is hastening the tombstones in the graveyard of newsprint. The 148-year-old Seattle Post-Intelligencer will publish its final print edition this week. Huge cutbacks were approved by the staff of the San Francisco Chronicle in an attempt to save the 144-year-old daily. The Rocky Mountain News in Denver closed last month. The publishers of the Minneapolis Star Tribune and both the The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News filed for bankruptcy. The Christian Science Monitor has abandoned print, for a small online operation that keeps the name alive - for now. The survival of even The New York Times is openly debated.

I could go on, but it's too painful. I come from a newspaper family, and worked as a reporter and editor for more than a dozen years, before peeling off for the allure of my own digital printing press in the 90s. I love newspapers, and I've always believed that they're central to the American version of representative democracy - a stalwart check on the power of government.

Yet even with ink in my veins and newsprint in my DNA, the patterns are changing 'round here. On the days that I commute into midtown on the train, The Times is an absolute and granite-carved morning habit. Liberated from its blue bag and advertising inserts at the station, the pattern is as unyielding as the order of the stations: the A section in the Bronx, sports by 125th Street, business in the tunnel, arts and lifestyle at a glance before hitting the platform. But on the days when I work from home - and even on Sundays - much of the paper arrives in the medium I'm typing into right now, and it often arrives via feeds or links from blogs and aggregators. Further, I'm often found reading commentary and reaction about stories in the Times before I've actually read the stories themselves.

Crowdsourcing journalism is all the rage, but the idea of its widespread ascendancy and competence is the exclusive province of either deranged optimists or ideological cyberlibertarians; the vast populace will never produce great journalism - or even sufficient journalism of the kind that has nurtured our republic - any more than it will perform surgery on a widespread amateur basis, or turn out competent oil paintings by the millions.

Yes, occasionally brilliant exceptions will be appear; the tools available for creating and disseminating great stories will be put to good use by people with the talent for reporting and telling those stories. But the journalistic print edifice will be not be replaced - in my view, there will be no great metro bureaus, no overseas reporting staffs, no full-time investigative teams, no cop house reporters, no City Hall beat. A network of thousands and thousands of young reporters taking notes and asking tough questions - and then writing up their reports in public, for the public - at thousands and thousands of school board and town council meetings on gray Tuesday evenings all around the nation will begin to fade.

The Internet has been a destructive force for many business models, but none threatens the basis of the  republic as much as the digital knife busily sawing at the fraying Achilles tendon of American newspapers.
As an editorial in the Spokane Review (rather plaintively) asked:

"So as newspapers die, it's worth considering the effects on society. Who will tell the people what their institutions are doing? Who will ferret out the corruption? Who will fend off the legal challenges to public information? If no viable alternative emerges, what does that mean for our representative democracy?

Author and NYU professor Clay Shirky wrote a grim and all-too-accurate assessment of journalism's dire strait, a piece that  really places no blame but captures well the doomsday formula now unfolding:

The unthinkable scenario unfolded something like this: The ability to share content wouldn’t shrink, it would grow. Walled gardens would prove unpopular. Digital advertising would reduce inefficiencies, and therefore profits. Dislike of micropayments would prevent widespread use. People would resist being educated to act against their own desires. Old habits of advertisers and readers would not transfer online. Even ferocious litigation would be inadequate to constrain massive, sustained law-breaking. (Prohibition redux.)

As Shirky says, this is not something that proprietors of professional journalism failed to see coming - and they've tried almost every model for revenue generation that came along over the past decade and a half. All have failed. Case in the point: the Times, which gets an amazing 20 million visits to its website every month and still can't come close to touching the revenue of its wounded print sibling. And aggregators from Google to the Huffington Post shave that slim online revenue even further.

The models just don't work - nothing online sustains a newsroom of 100 reporters and editors working in a beat system. Cut and paste works online. Endless commentary works online (but only pays the aggregators, in most cases). Endless links work. Newsrooms do not. As Shirky writes (correctly in my view) the casualty isn't so much the newspaper (and the companies who operate them), as it is the journalist - and professional journalism itself. And that is a huge loss for society that no one should be welcome with glee (though some digital triumphalists cannot seem to restrain themselves):

Print media does much of society’s heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding the zone — covering every angle of a huge story — to the daily grind of attending the City Council meeting, just in case. This coverage creates benefits even for people who aren’t newspaper readers, because the work of print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to talk radio hosts to bloggers. The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it. The internet turns 40 this fall. Access by the general public is less than half that age. Web use, as a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world, is less than half that age. We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.

Craig Newmark, creator of the ubiquitous classified network that has hurt the newspaper model, argues that "we need to experiment a lot more" on ways to support the kind of journalism now getting pink-slipped. But I have to say: we've all been making that argument since the mid-90s. The experiments are legion. Yet the corps of full-time paid journalists is shrinking rapidly, and their work cannot be replaced by bloggers or posts on Facebook, as much as may enjoy those social media forms. I was talking with James Wolcott about this earlier this week and he made a great point - who's going to churn out all those important but relatively small-scale exposes on bad government contracts and neighborhood graft, the kinds of pieces regularly published by the tabloids and small city dailies? As Bob Stein writes, apropos of reporting's demise: "For journalism, the goal has never been cosmic verities but everyday truth."

Last year at the Personal Democracy Forum, NYU professor and media critic Jay Rosen gave a talk about the rise of semi-pro journalism that took in some of the still-arrogant attitude of "old journalism" and its resistance to going to way of the dinosaur. He adapted the talk for his blog:

We are early in the rise of semi-pro journalism, but well into the decline of an older way of life within the tribe of professional journalists. I call them a tribe because they share a culture and a sense of destiny, and because they think they own the press— that it’s theirs somehow because they dominate the practice.

The First Amendment says to all Americans: you have a right to publish what you know, to say what you think. That right used to be abstractly held. Now it is concretely held because the power to publish has been distributed to the population at large. Projects that cause people to exercise their right to a free press strengthen the press, whether or not these projects strengthen the professional journalist’s “hold” on the press.

That hold is slipping every day. Yet some of Rosen's set piece, his construction of the central tension in the story, now seems quaint, only nine months later. The attitude of recalcitrant old print journalists doesn't matter any more in this season of shuttered newsrooms. It's not about old journalists versus the rising amateurs. It's about the disappearance of one of the carrying beams of our democracy and what, if anything, will replace it - and the loss of that "everyday truth."

UPDATE: Over at the WiredPen, Kathy Gill has a thoughtful response. She agrees that there is nothing on the horizon to replace newspaper, even while arguing that newspaper-owning companies aren't generally motivated by the public good (true) and that democracy hasn't exactly thrived under the model now disappearing (true, to a degree). These viewpoints are also echoed in some the comments here. Yeah, newspapers aren't public and the big dailies are indeed run by large corporations. But my response is this: that in no way mitigates the loss. Small-scale experiments in online reporting - and we're in 2009, a full 15 years into the mainstream commercial Internet - seem more like the exceptions that prove the rule. What we lose with newspapers is the commonality - that "place" in cities and towns where a good percentage of citizens gathered around news and opinion and recipes for pork chow mein. And Clay Shirky is right - it's a big loss, and there's nothing that can be done about it.

UPDATE II: Will Bunch gets to the heart of an aspect of the "distributed, super-wired world of citizen journalists with blogs will replace newspapers" argument that has been bugging me as well: it's anti-blue collar to its core. Posits Bunch: "I'm trying to point out the unique challenge of preserving journalism and the vital exchange of public information in a Rust Belt city like Philadelphia. A Web-only newspaper might work in the home city of Microsoft, Amazon.com, and Starbucks. In the home city of....lots of civil servants? Not as much. I agree that printed news is a little like dirty bathwater these days, but you can't throw the baby -- a unique, non-transferable readership -- out with bathwater.

Il Duce Gets Smoochy

Looking for all the world like the sweating floor manager on the late afternoon shift at Larry Flynt's Hustler Club in an unbuttoned shiny black shirt and undersized sport coat, Rush Limbaugh leaned his meaty hands on the lectern at the CPAC conference and slipped a greasy dollar bill into the G-string of the writhing conservative dead-enders packed into garishly lit Omni Shoreham in Washington DC.

Jowls rolling like thunder from the right via CNN's unfortunate high-definition feed, Limbaugh took control of the sad and tattered remnants of the mainstream conservative movement, and urged continued allegiance to the noble Lost Cause of Reagan, metaphorically carrying his rebel-yelling followers into the hills like modern-day Quantrill's Raiders standing firm against change.

If there's any doubt that the GOP's own Paulie Walnuts  is now firmly in command of the Party of Lincoln, the "breaking news" style coverage of Limbaugh's bellow-cose rant dispelled the notion. CNN, for one, went wide - with the kind of uninterrupted live footage usually reserved for Presidents and Popes, followed by a panel of analysts to weigh and consider the import of the speech to this republic of ours. There were other dancers on the stage, to be sure - including Ward Connerly, Ann Coulter, Phyllis Schlafly and Karl Rove - but only Limbaugh's hour-long ramble (he went over by 30 minutes) garnered opposition leader status. "As the movement searches for a front-and-center spokesman to provide inspiration and direction, Limbaugh's refusal to tilt toward the center may place him out front in a Republican Party already suffering from a disappearing moderate wing," wrote Tom Schaller in Salon.

Limbaugh is a showbiz talent, and he is taking full advantage of this moment of rudderless, thoughtless spinning in circles by Republicans to seize the stage in full-throated opposition to the overwhelmingly popular new President - and virtually everything he stands for. In rooting publicly for Barack Obama's failure, Limbaugh may be leading the conservative movement to a smaller, fringe-like existence in the halls of power - but it will an existence that he can easily dominate.

Leading gullible Republicans into the hills of guerrilla ideological resistance during the nation's toughest economic crisis in 80 years constitutes a gift of incredible political proportions for the Obama Administration. Instead of principled point-by-point opposition by a chastened party of experienced professionals ready for tough dealings at the bargaining table, President Obama is blessed with clownish truculence and pure rejectionism - embodied in the Republican response to the President's forceful Congressional address by Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, a moment of excruciatingly tone-deaf ideology rescued only by the attention lavished on its shockingly poor delivery.

President Obama, of course, is aware of this lumbering and clumsy gift from the right - so much so that he sent chief of staff Rahm Emanuel to Bob Schieffer's CBS studio this morning to declare Limbaugh "the voice and the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party." 

And it's that blustery intellectual force that convinces Republicans like Jindal and Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi that their political futures are enlarge and brightened by a nihilistic refusal of Federal funds to their own communities. "White kids on dope," jibed conservative Rod Dreher, one of a small cadre of right-wing commentators to take on the Limbaugh lemming movement, the willful ignorance of the current crisis and the nation's ultimate rejection of a failed a humiliated party leadership. "No need to return to first principles and recalibrate policies to account for new realities," wrote Dreher. "Just find a better messenger for the same old same old. You begin to see why nobody inside that bubble could grasp what a flop Bobby Jindal's reheated Republican mush of a speech was going to be ahead of time."

Rush Limbaugh is right about one thing: President Obama is indeed on a mission of reinvention. That much was clear from his speech on Capitol Hill last week - and even clearer in his budget proposal. And, as Limbaugh undoubtedly knows, the President holds the whip hand for the foreseeable future. So Limbaugh plays to that loss of power in his audience, and in a speech that referred bizarrely to "slave blood" and a defense of John Thain (who seems to literally be asking for a set of numbered orange duds from Andrew Coumo) and the spending habits of bail-out bankers, he laid on some false concern for Obama:

President Obama is one of the most gifted politicians, one of the most gifted men that I have ever witnessed. He has extraordinary talents. He has communication skills that hardly anyone can surpass. No, seriously. No, no, I’m being very serious about this. It just breaks my heart that he does not use these extraordinary talents and gifts to motivate and inspire the American people to be the best they can be. He’s doing just the opposite. And it’s a shame. [Applause] President Obama has the ability — he has the ability to inspire excellence in people’s pursuits. He has the ability to do all this, yet he pursues a path, seeks a path that punishes achievement, that punishes earners and punishes — and he speaks negatively of the country. Ronald Reagan used to speak of a shining city on a hill. Barack Obama portrays America as a soup kitchen in some dark night in a corner of America that’s very obscure. He’s constantly telling the American people that bad times are ahead, worst times are ahead. And it’s troubling, because this is the United States of America.

Yes, Rush this is the United States of America. And your timely and spectacular gift to the President is much appreciated indeed.