A simplistic analysis of newspaper decline vs an in-depth one

David Sirota, progressive doorknobs bless him, says poor news coverage is behind newspapers’ accelerating decline.

It’s nice as far as it goes. But, we had poor news coverage well before 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq. And, it’s simplistic.

Here’s a much wider look at the problem.

My observations come from the fringes of the inside. I’m currently the editor of suburban Dallas weekly; I started my career at a small, community-level daily.

First, without being snarky, David, it is true that news quality has been on decline for well before 9/11. When Jeff Gerth wasn’t writing no-story stories about Whitewater, other media stories were putting Clinton on the celebrity pedestal.

Second, there’s been other internal self-shootings besides the ones you mentioned.

Biggest of these was already a decade or so ago, when big newspaper owners, CEOs and boards refused to accept that the days of the 30 percent profit margin, which they seemed to think was a divine right, were going away never to return.

John Nichols has a much more in-depth take at The Nation, by the way. Among his talking points is precisely this issue.

That, then, caused cuts not only in local writers and editors, but folks like copy editors, which can affect quality.

(At the same time, seven-day dailies had fat they could have cut earlier. Nobody short of movie fanatics probably care if the review of a new movie was locally generated or not.)

That said, you take the Internet too lightly, David. Papers now whore after crumbs of ad revenue on it, even though, last year, by percentage, online ad revenue declined more than hardcopy revenue.

Why? Internet ads and money are like the Red River in West Texas in summer — a mile wide but just an inch deep.

Between pop-up blockers and a regularly updated hosts file, I don’t even see a lot of online ads. So, online ad designers create more obnoxious ones, while the folks at Firefox et al up their ad-blocking skills.

(BTW, that’s another reason not to use Google Chrome, IMO. Google has a vested interest in its’ ad-blocking capability being “leaky.”)

Oh, and both big dailies and alt-weeklies have seen BIG classified ad losses to Craigslist.

The current system, for big dailies at least, probably is broken beyond viable repair. Community newspapers, and special/niche papers, such as those for gays or other interest groups, blacks or other socio-ethnic groups, and Spanish-language or other non-English ones will do better. But even that is a relative term.