Shoptalk: Print Will Survive But newspapers need to widen coverage of ordinary Americans.
By
Ben Bagdikian
(March 01, 2004) -- The birth and spectacular growth of the Internet have been accompanied by the last rites pronounced over the impending death of words printed on paper. One inventor, Ray Kurzweil, who works with devices for the blind, has written that by 2030 molecule-sized brain implants receiving images and words will eliminate the need for texts. More typical was the 2001 prediction of Image Source Company CEO Ted Padova: "Personally… I believe that most of us will see near-extinction of printed works in our lifetime."
Daily newspapers, now often a minor subsidiary among the multi-
tude of other media owned by large conglomerates, have been regarded as cumbersome properties with an unpromising future. On the surface, there is cause for concern. For more than 30 years, daily circulation of printed papers has been falling, as have the numbers of daily papers in the country. In many ways, the newspaper is the most troublesome medium the conglomerates own. And of all the printed media, it was the first for which most of the end-of-print predictors assumed an early death.
Multimedia firms prefer properties that are easily converted for re-use among their other media, like novels into movies into videos. Daily news cannot be easily recycled. An original news item is dead the day it is printed, while a popular sitcom or detective series can have an impressive life span.
The endurance of daily papers seems puzzling when people, faced with the pace of modern urban life, constantly complain that "no one has enough time." And in today's miniaturized, portable society, the newspaper seems to have a strange and even ridiculous form. Opened wide, it is a menace on a crowded commuter train. Read outdoors, a sudden breeze can create a comic scene of frantic indignity.
The huge expanse of the newspaper page is the result of a 17th-century tax dodge. When the British Crown lost patience with uppity London newspapers and placed a ruinous tax on each page, the publishers displayed their historic ability to escape taxes by simply expanding the size of each page so much that the tax-per-page didn't put them out of business. Ever since, newspaper presses have been built to issue the largest printed page in world publishing.
But a more social factor keeps the newspaper a common artifact in the digital age. Newspapers have a unique social function that their media competitors do not. They are crucial to American local civic life, which, in turn, is a unique part of the U.S. political system. No other industrial democracy leaves to each community the control of its local schools, police, land use, and most taxes. In other countries these are national functions. Thus, every American city and town has voters involved in the performance of the school system in which their children are educated, in the taxes they pay on their property, even the behavior of the local sheriff's department. They vote on these on election day, and the only medium that informs them of these matters in any detail is the printed newspaper.
Readers on any given day can quickly scan 40 or 100 social and political stories and accounts of cultural events, all capable of detail and background. Broadcasting can transmit only one item at a time. But because social characteristics are difficult to quantify on the charts of Wall Street analysts (on Wall Street, numbers are Holy Scripture), predictions of an early demise for newspapers will continue.
While the daily newspaper has refused to die, it would be romantic to ascribe the survival of newspapers to their unblemished virtue. Too many publishers have wanted short-range success with truncated staffs, shrunken news space, and uninterrupted growth of profits. There is still far from universal recognition by owners of newspaper chains that their advantage over competing media is precisely the wide selection of subject matter capable of depth and detail that cannot be copied by other media.
Furthermore, most newspapers still reflect in their sources and content the world as seen by leaders of corporate and public offices. Seldom do daily sections deal with continuing needs of ordinary American families, needs that differ from those of the people with whom publishers have lunch.
Despite their longer and more numerous stories, newspapers share with other media responsibility for the narrow political spectrum in American electoral politics. Newspapers' relatively detailed stories are still clustered around the center-right of politics because their news is mainly drawn from corporate life and major political leaders. It was not always this way, and the country's politics showed it. The U.S. major media now display a constricted political spectrum — a powerful factor in the relatively narrow range of choices that American voters face each election day.
This article is adapted from The New Media Monopoly, a revised and updated edition of the classic 1983 book The Media Monopoly, to be published by Beacon Press in May. Copyright 2004 by Ben H. Bagdikian, by permission of Beacon Press. Ben Bagdikian
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