Newspapers should echo the comments of Mark Twain, who remarked to a reporter when told news of Twain’s death had been bandied about in New York: “Just say the report of my death has been exaggerated.”
Despite the crowing of Internet aficionados and TV cable networks, newspapers are still alive and likely to remain so for a long, long, long, long, long time. They simply may come to subscribers in a different form.
This topic of the demise of newspapers was discussed this week during the annual meeting of The American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington, D.C., where the group’s president, David Zeeck, executive editor of The News Tribune in Tacoma, Wash., called this period in the business a “Gutenberg moment” – or a time of revolution. (In Johann Gutenberg’s case, it was a time when the entire process of disseminating the written word went from hand-printed fliers to mass-printed books.) Zeeck said it is “a time to get over our past and get on with our future.”
Zeeck told fellow editors that newspapers still have three great strengths that TV and Internet news aggregators simply cannot replicate:
* “One, our dominance in every local market – in print and online – means we’re still the source of most news in this country. We’ll keep that dominance for a long time. We have the advantage, as [media critic] Tom Rosenstiel says, of more boots on the ground. Those boots give us the advantage of covering important news that no one else covers, and of presenting a high barrier to market entry for any competitor.”
* “Another newspaper strength we must carry into the future is our investigative and enterprise reporting. I prefer [Washington Post editor and associate editor] Len Downie and Bob Kaiser’s phrase – accountability reporting – because it recalls our constitutional mandate to hold the powerful to account. Whatever you call it, newspapers are still the source of almost all serious accountability reporting in the nation.”
* “The third strength of newspapers – and the most important – is you, the editors in this room.”
Editors are the people who bring vision to a newspaper and make sure other editors and reporters are executing that vision in a daily news package designed to meet the needs of all readers. Scores of news, feature and sports reporters – as well as photographers and graphic artists – are sent into the field to find out what is happening, dig out the trends and report and document breaking news. The most complete wire service packages are offered on events around the world. But make no mistake, newspaper readers – in print and online – want that extremely local news that shapes their daily lives. Only newspapers provide a complete look at all of this news.
Moving against conventional wisdom that the Internet will consume us all, Zeeck emphasized his point about cyberspace (excepting, of course, Web sites for newspapers) by saying:
“I’m told the blogosphere is going to eat our lunch. Well, the blogosphere, for the most part, spends its infinitely expanding gas talking about what we – newspapers – write, not what some blogger reported. If newspapers disappeared tomorrow it would be like pulling the fuel rods from a nuclear reactor: The lights would go out and the blogosphere wouldn’t produce a single BTU of intellectual heat.
“It’s the same with the Internet in general. When someone tells me they get their news from the Internet, I want to say: “Oh yeah? So, tell me again, how many reporters does Yahoo have at City Hall? How many correspondents from Google are risking their lives in Iraq?”
At The Salt Lake Tribune, we can tell if some Internet news aggregator has linked to one of our stories by seeing a spike in visits prompted by Yahoo or Google News. It is time, however, that newspapers spend more time explaining to the public the importance of the news reporters bring into their lives.
Several weeks ago I was at Riverton High where The Silver Scribe adviser, April Squires, had organized an assembly to celebrate Sunshine Week – the time of year set aside to study the open government and public access to governmental records laws in the individual states.
Frankly, some of the kids were looking bored until I hit them where it would hurt:
“How would you feel if the Legislature passed a law making it illegal for people under the age of 18 to drink carbonated sodas, or eat Doritos or Twinkies or Ding Dongs, and no one told you they were considering such a move?” I asked.
They stirred in their seats. Suddenly news about what the Legislature was doing did not seem so boring. “Newspaper reporters are the people who go to the long meetings in the Legislature and keep you aware of what your lawmakers are planning. If we did not cover those meetings, then the Legislature could operate in the dark,” I said.
There are about 2 million stories in the naked state – and we aim to find every one of them, eventually.
