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Can There Be Life After Newspapers?
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Dec 5, 2009 |
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Former FCC commissioner Nicholas Johnson takes a look at the current state of the newspaper industry and the new way people get their news. |
By Nicholas Johnson
Dr. Politics asks me, “Could Iowa live without the Register?”
True to my responsibility as a law professor to respond to every question with a question I reply, “Why not?” – followed by, more seriously, “What do you mean by ‘the Register’?”
For the Register, after all, is a verb, a process, not a noun.
Lewis Thomas, in Lives of a Cell, suggests that beehives may be the organisms in which bees are but cells.
Newspapers are also living – and dying – organisms, constantly evolving and changing, bee hives of activity, with reporters buzzing about, collecting pollen far from the hive, handing it over to editors who help shape it into the honey that sometimes causes the paper to stick to the breakfast table.
All media have been affected by technology since scribes in monasteries lost jobs to printing presses. The 19th Century telegraph expanded the reach and currency of newspapers’ content. The 20th Century radio deprived newspapers of the drama wrought by the newsboy’s cry, “Extra! Extra! Read all about it!” – as hourly news updates came to subscribers through the ether.
Television brought moving pictures of the day’s news, formerly limited to dated Fox Movietone News in movie theaters. And satellite delivery to regional printing plants brought Iowa the same-day USA Today and New York Times to compete with the Register.
With its online, Internet presence the Register, like most of the world’s newspapers, entered a cyberspace simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. My Web site’s “Global Media” link delivers newspapers to my home from Europe, the Middle East, or Asia as quickly as from Des Moines. The world’s newspapers can now be, as the Register once was, “newspapers all Iowa depends upon.” This “Register” can be updated as rapidly as the radio news – and “delivered” to readers far beyond any radio station’s signal. Moreover, every reader can be a writer for this electronic, digital Register – with their comments “printed” as soon as received.
Unfortunately, the newspaper industry staggered into the mist of cyberspace before considering how it could continue to make as much money by giving away the content as by selling it to subscribers and space to advertisers. It’s still grasping for digital delivery’s illusive business model.
So what do you mean by “the Register?”
If you mean the paper I delivered as a boy and continued to read in hard copy, it was indeed “the newspaper all Iowa depends upon.” It had won more Pulitzer Prizes than any newspaper except the New York Times. And it was bringing that prize-winning journalism to the lunch counters of small town cafes all across the state.
I can walk into a town, look around, and tell you something about that town’s paper. The reverse is also true. You could examine any issue of a 1960s Des Moines Register and say, “This paper’s readers are going to be among the nation’s best informed. They’ll pay for top quality schools. They’ll vote for some of the brightest, most thoughtful representatives in Washington.”
But once family owned papers go public their readers discover Wall Street doesn’t care about small town cafes’ well-informed patrons. In fact, the less those coffee drinkers know the wealthier its “masters of the universe” can become. Wall Street doesn’t even care about profit; what it cares about is ever increasing profits impact on stock prices.
That’s why the state’s Register retreated into a “Des Moines Register.”
And that’s why papers making 20 percent profit margins lay off worker bee reporters. Because when readership and advertising revenues decline the only way to increase profits is to cut costs, which means payrolls and news – especially the investigative journalism that Wall Street never was all that enthusiastic about anyway.
“Could Iowa live without the Register?” Yes, it could live without any given Iowa paper, including the Register – whatever past, present or future incarnation you may mean.
But what no self-governing, democratic society’s citizens can live without is the function those papers originally, and to some extent still, perform: bringing us a large enough daily dose of data, information, and range of opinion that we can function as “public citizens.”
That dose may come on paper, or the screen of a Kindle, computer, iPhone, or TV. It may be a spreadsheet, essay, streaming audio or video. It may come from a blog or a bureau of government, an RSS feed, Google news alert or wiki site.
But without the right and opportunity to feed, and dine on, that informed, bubbling, ever-changing and expanding public dialog Iowa could not live – at least not in the style to which we’ve become accustomed.
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Former FCC commissioner Nicholas Johnson teaches at the University of Iowa College of Law and maintains the Web site www.nicholasjohnson.org and the blog FromDC2Iowa.blogspot.com.
