Opinion: Do newspapers matter anymore?

Posted by Rosemary D'Amour on December 16, 2008 at 10:08 AM

Is the recent Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich scandal proof that the newspaper industry still has relevance?

Blagojevich's efforts to remove editorial members of the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times' David Carr argues, show that the newspaper still has an impact--if a governor is willing to allegedly extort money in return for favorable press, then the paper must be doing something right.

The scandal, he says, is justification for investigative journalism through a print medium. A daily paper is a "civic necessity." If a community lacks a proper outlet, or was "too diminished" for full reporting, then what would have been the result in Illinois?

"Who says the modern American newspaper doesn't matter?" Carr asks.

TJ Sullivan. In his LA Observed column "Native Intelligence," Sullivan argues the opposite point.

"Newspapers don't matter," he writes. "Otherwise people would be reading them."

The future of the newspaper industry is bleak, to say the least. Newspapers are closing down all over the world, reducing staff and print editions, or even days of home delivery, as is the case with two newspapers in Detroit, because of the worst ad recession since the Depression and sinking readership.

The Tribune Co. has filed for bankruptcy, which would have made Blagojevich's offer enticing. While Carr states that there is no evidence that the Tribune took Blagojevich up on his offer, Sullivan argues the very idea that we have to consider if it did "says more than anything else."

For the past decade, Sullivan argues, the "relevance" for newspapers has been the struggle to hold onto readers and revenue at any cost. The public no longer sees a newspaper as a public service, but as "just another business."

There's a "threat posed to democracy" by shrinking newsrooms, Sullivan writes. But the public is not likely to recognize it until the "harm caused by newspapers' absence is undeniable," which is why the situation is "bound to get worse before it gets better."
Investigative reporting is often the answer media analysts provide for the future of newspapers. And yet, even Tribune Co. owner Sam Zell discredits the work, claiming, "I haven't figured out how to cash in a Pulitzer Prize."

Tribune editor Gerould Kern said that the paper's most eventful week, first bankruptcy, then a huge breaking story, is proof that the business model must be reinvented and proof of the importance of newspapers as a public service.

"As a citizen and a journalist," said David Jackson, an investigative reporter on a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, "you have to wonder whether the paper will have the resources moving forward to continue to do [investigative] work."

Source: New York Times and LA Observed