Three Fingers Pointing Back

The most fecund beat in journalism is writing obits for journalism and the past month has provided plenty of fertilizer – layoffs at the Los Angeles Times (which will be on the block soon enough), layoffs the zombie magazine Time, and layoffs at Sports Illustrated, a zombie publication that still managed to jettison almost all of what you might call its staff, whether human or computer-generated. Other examples abound, but I’ll leave it at three’s-a-trend.

Jack Shafer ably sums it up in Politico, a column he writes every six months, with the lede outlining the bad news and the context for the bad news cut and pasted from previous columns. The piece is unimpeachable, as far as it goes.

But not quite far enough.

The story journalists tell themselves: back in the day, newspapers had an absolute monopoly reporting current, financed mostly through ad revenue. Then radio and TV cut into it, but the fallout - five newspaper towns becoming two newspaper towns – worked out fine for the survivors. This arrangement ran on autopilot, lucratively and smoothly though with some casualties, until the web in general and Craigslist in particular wiped out most ad dollars. Throw in the waning demand for shit to read and here we are.

This tale blames, to use a phrase fashionable with the Substack crowd, “exogenous forces” for the decline, and it does capture much of the tragedy. It’d be closer to the truth, though, if it included some of the shit-stupid stuff the business did to itself.

Move number one, obviously, was giving away for free what was charged for in print. (The auto and steel industries, for instance, didn’t toss around sedans and pig iron gratis when faced with their own exogenous forces.) The industry’s rationale is still difficult to understand. The best I can come up with is an imbecilic combo of credulous belief in the commercial power of the web and sloganeering about “information wants to be free. The damage was probably fatal by the time the practice was corrected.

Probably, not definitely, for dumb move number two was a bumptious indifference to innovation. The music business got clobbered faster and harder than the news biz, but after fits and starts it made streaming work for it on a paying basis, if in part on the backs of musicians. No such vision can be found in newspaper management. No killer apps, no indispensable services, no meaningful personalization, no nothing.

Dumb move number three was recruiting lunatics into newsrooms and letting them go buck wild on social media. All the President’s Men (book, 1974; flick, 1976) notwithstanding, journalists have never been the most popular figures in life’s rich pageant. Folks will appreciate a journalist for a specific deed (All the President’s Men, book, 1974), but in the abstracted estimation of John Q. Public journalists register someplace between indifference and irritating. They’re like lawyers that way; it’s usually not good news when either one calls. Hiring zealots has poured gas on what had been the smoldering annoyance that characterizes public perception of the business. If you don’t believe me, look at Gallup polls about institutional trust. (Credit where due: there is some evidence, albeit anecdotal, this problem is waning.)

At this point, the handwringing about how bad the decline is for the body politic is just pro forma, however much I agree with it. If someone wants to do something about it, correct dumb move number two.