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Politics as Usual by Jim Baron Thomas Jefferson famously wrote: “were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
Unfortunately for Tom and the rest of us, we may soon find out what it is like to have the former.
You have seen the reports from all over the country of once-mighty and important newspapers being brought low by the economy, competition from new electronic and digital media, the foolhardy apathy about news and politics from an almost willfully dumb public, and, yes, our own arrogance, shortsightedness and ultimate inability to adapt to new and emerging information technologies.
But I am convinced there is one other culprit that has not been assigned the lion’s share of blame it deserves: Wall Street.
For years and years, when newspapers were family run operations, the newspaper publisher was always one of the wealthiest guys in town — a pillar of the community, chamber of commerce type, living in the biggest house in the nicest neighborhood.
Then two things happened sometime around the 1970s.
One is that, thanks to Watergate and Woodward and Bernstein, newspapers and journalism were cool, and exceedingly profitable. At that time, newspaper companies could hardly have made more money if they used their presses to print $100 bills.
But as we have seen in so many areas of life since back when they were writing the Greek tragedies, success sows the seeds of its own downfall.
That tremendous profit and new chic (but especially the tremendous profit) drew the attention of Wall Street at about the same time that the next generation of the families that owned the newspapers were more interested in cashing in for millions rather than getting their hands stained with ink running the family business.
Once the business whizzes got their hands on the newspaper companies, however, they ran the immensely profitable enterprises into the ground in the matter of a few quick decades. While the double-digit profits were able to make the newspaper families “fabulously well-to-do” — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s phrase for “stinking rich — that did not come close to serving the insatiable greed of Corporate America’s investing class.
Almost instantly, the new corporate owners — seeing the expensive, labor intensive nature of good journalism up close — almost immediately went on a regime of cost-cutting and downsizing to make their bottom lines look more attractive to Wall Street traders and boost their stock prices
Not only that, they also went on greedy acquisition splurges, purchasing newspaper companies like they were collectable Beanie Babies and piling up mountains and mountains of debt that is now crashing down around the parent companies’ ears and forcing the closing or ruination of individual newspapers that are still profitable or close to it.
Those that are left now have no way of climbing out of the hole because what they had that made them valuable — the reporters, the editors, the news bureaus in statehouses and courthouses and in Washington, D.C., and foreign countries — were all downsized away years ago. Except for a few journalistic romantics hanging on for reasons of sheer cussedness, and a determination that newspapers can’t be allowed to die, the people who could help bring newspapers back from the brink are all gone now.
Back in the corporate heyday, if there was money that could be paid out in dividends or plowed into building bigger and bigger empires of more and more newspaper outlets, well the corporate overlords were not interested in squandering any of that dough on improving their products or enhancing the journalism they performed. These geniuses were going to cut and borrow their way to obscene profits, and the one who died with the most toys would win.
Key decisions about how to operate a newspaper were no longer being made by a curmudgeonly editor who grew up in the business and knew the responsibility and the ethics involved in a business that, as Thomas Jefferson suggested, is essential to our existence as a functioning democracy and self-governing people. Instead it was some hedge fund (bleep)head with a single-minded insistence on “maximizing shareholder value,” and who couldn’t see past the tip of their nose, or beyond the current quarter’s profit statement who was calling the shots. By cutting staff and cutting bureaus and cut, cut, cutting other expenses for immediate cash to use to buy and milk dry other newspapers, the would-be journalistic empire builders were eating their own seed corn.
A few months ago I was asked to speak to a journalism class at Rhode Island College and one of the students wanted to know how to go about launching a career in journalism. It broke my heart to have to tell the kid not to.
I said unless it is a calling, something you have a burning need to do, you shouldn’t even think about taking a job writing for a newspaper. Well, the same goes for owning one. Unless you have the fervent zeal and the commitment to do this job of such fundamental importance — I know this is special interest pleading, but I nonetheless insist that except for the farmers who grow our food and the doctors and nurses who cure our ills, few businesses are more important to the well-being of the nation as a whole as journalism in general and newspapers in particular — and do it right, you should stay out of the newspaper business.
It has to be a passion, not just another line on spreadsheet; because newspapers perform an absolutely indispensible public service and that is something the bottom-liners and bean counters are incapable of understanding.
I don’t know where we go from here any more than anyone else does. There is talk — in fact there was a U.S. Senate hearing last week — about allowing newspapers to become non-profit entities. That might be worth looking into, since we have become non-profit entities already anyway.
But I do know that something has to be done by somebody and fast.
Because for all the smug derisions of “dead-tree media” by Gen-X and Gen-Y types, what we know about politics and government and the sometimes virtuous, sometimes seedy people in those professions, we know because a reporter for a newspaper or magazine found it out. Without that expensive and labor intensive investment by somebody, bloggers are going to have to get out of their pajamas and get a job because they are going to have no raw material to work with.
There may always be a New York Times and Washington Post — then again, there may not be; just look in our own backyard at the Boston Globe, which is surviving only because the corporate masters at the New York Times Corp. extorted millions of dollars in givebacks from the unions representing the men and women who work there — but without thriving newspapers, who is going to tell you how your tax dollars in Pawtucket or Woonsocket are being used, or misused? Who is going to tell you that the politicians are planning a supplemental tax increase in time for you to get to them and put a stop to it?
Even the things that are not momentous are still important to people. Where else are you going to learn about the exploits of the local high school sports teams, or the Little Leagues? Or what the schools are teaching in sex-ed classes? Or how the state budget is going to affect not only your income taxes, but local property taxes?
Newspapers are certainly not perfect, and we are even exasperating at times, but you would miss us terribly if we were gone. |
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