Simon is the producer of HBO show “The Wire” and a former reporter for the Baltimore Sun.

He isn’t the one to claim that the general public may have given up on news. A few days ago, Guardian blogger Roy Greenslade expressed the same fears, in the wake of a study about the evolution of UK’s newspaper readership.

In his piece, Simon retraces the ‘demise’ – rather their decline since their golden age – of major newspapers through his experience at the Baltimore Sun.

On the other hand, new figures from the Newspaper Association of America revealed that the number of unique visitors to newspaper websites in the US rose more than 6% last year, to a monthly average of 60 million. During the fourth quarter, 39% of all active Web users visited newspaper websites, with visits averaging 44 minutes per month.

Alex Alben, high-tech executive in Seattle, mitigated Simon’s argument in the Seattle Times, claiming that people are still hungry for news. He did acknowledge newspaper’s current business struggles and weaknesses in their business model, as discussed by Starwave Corporation CEO Mike Slade in 1996 at a Columbia University forum on the future of news:

“- Well over half of the content in a given daily edition is commodity content, such as feeds from The Associated Press and syndicated comics and columns.

- The other half is really the product of (give or take) 50 to 100 people with journalism degrees;

- A relatively small percentage of a given metro area subscribes to a daily paper;

- Newspapers rely on classified ads, which would one day be supplanted by free online classified ads — this was five years before the appearance of Craigslist.”

But in Alben’s view, newspapers “will figure out how to extend their brands and readership into the online world.” Newspapers are still today among the most trusted and credible sources of information, and probably the best news providers for any local information.

Another response to Simon, published in the Post, came from Sara Libby, legal editor of Los Angeles Daily Journal. She “was absolutely dumbfounded by David Simon's recent article in Outlook in which he suggests not only that the era of eager, dedicated journalists is over, but that nobody even cares about the news anymore.”

“The fact remains, however, that Americans are genuinely and intensely concerned about news. Suggesting otherwise might be a good plot device for Hollywood dream weavers like Simon.”

Perhaps there are less people who regularly read news nowadays. Perhaps the type of news the audience seek has tended to become softer. Perhaps there are more distribution channels through which they can access news. But the importance of newspapers and news outlets – whether in principle or in their actual impact – hasn’t diminished.

What do you think?

Source: Washington Post (David Simon - Sara Libby) – Seattle Times – Follow the Media – European Journalism Centre