The State of the News

The New Yorker article Out of Print: The death and life of the American newspaper last week by Eric Alterman doesn't say too much that we all here haven't reported on or said before, but it is an interesting read to get his take on, among many other things of concern to news folk, the Bill Keller speech in Europe that both Aaron and I wrote commentaries upon.

Bill Keller, the executive editor of the Times, said recently in a speech in London, “At places where editors and publishers gather, the mood these days is funereal. Editors ask one another, ‘How are you?,’ in that sober tone one employs with friends who have just emerged from rehab or a messy divorce.” Keller’s speech appeared on the Web site of its sponsor, the Guardian, under the headline “NOT DEAD YET.”

I also think someone needs to send Alterman a copy of Aaron's book, the Rise of the Blogosphere.

Much of Alterman's conclusions resonate:

Until recently, newspapers were accustomed to operating as high-margin monopolies. To own the dominant, or only, newspaper in a mid-sized American city was, for many decades, a kind of license to print money. In the Internet age, however, no one has figured out how to rescue the newspaper in the United States or abroad. Newspapers have created Web sites that benefit from the growth of online advertising, but the sums are not nearly enough to replace the loss in revenue from circulation and print ads.

Most managers in the industry have reacted to the collapse of their business model with a spiral of budget cuts, bureau closings, buyouts, layoffs, and reductions in page size and column inches. Since 1990, a quarter of all American newspaper jobs have disappeared. The columnist Molly Ivins complained, shortly before her death, that the newspaper companies’ solution to their problem was to make “our product smaller and less helpful and less interesting.”

PS. For my Rhode Island friends who tout the Providence Journal as the oldest continuously printed daily newspaper... it is the the Courant which is the oldest continuously printed paper, period.

It really was not until 1721, when the printer James Franklin launched the New England Courant, that any of Britain’s North American colonies saw what we might recognize today as a real newspaper.

Though long (what substantive New Yorker article isn't?) Out of Print: The death and life of the American newspaper is well worth the read.