UPDATED: Do Readers No Longer Care About True News Values?

By: Michael Odza I am very glad Professor Michael Bugeja and so many of the people who responded to his essay still have that passion for the news that drew me to this career, and I hope that they spread the "virus" far and wide. However, I do have to disagree with several key statements.

First is his timeline of the beginning of our troubles, which Bugeja seems to peg to the rise of the Internet. My reading of our history shows that newspaper circulation as a percentage of the population peaked in the 1930s. While gross circulation rose through the 1970s, total newspaper readership began to fall after World War II. Newspaper circulation as a percentage of all households has been declining for generations. The Internet is only the latest challenge.

The second issue is the sentence Bugeja resurrects from his May 2005 response to Michael Kinsley: "Don't we realize that our entire history is associated with the community, which we have abandoned because consultants in the dubious 'dot.com' days told us to go online where the money was ? or risk extinction?"

I don?t know which consultants he?s referring to, but the ones I read in the late 1990s were right on the money ? poor choice of phrase ?were quite accurate in their predictions of the changes the new many-to-many structure of the Web would entrain. Read ?The Cluetrain Manifesto? or ?Blown to Bits? now, and see how accurate they remain.

Then there?s the fact that newspapers overall actually have been very slow to go online. Yes, they had ?a? web site (ours was called The Zia Connection, in 1996), but only as a defensive move. But with rare exceptions, they didn?t embrace it the way Schibstedt did in Norway, or the big three did in launching cars.com and Careerbuilder.com. And certainly not the way their competitors have!

Then there?s that word "money." It?s still rare to find a newspaper (or magazine publisher or TV station director) publisher who is proud of his or her Internet revenue even today. They didn?t go to the Internet for the money ? they went there following their readers.

Bugeja briefly mentions readers, but only by dismissing them in favor of concentrating on reporters. But I don?t think reporters and editors changed anything they did before the mid-2000s, and then only with the greatest reluctance. They were (and in many cases are) still covering beats defined in the nineteenth century even while the world changed around them. As a small example, years ago I created a successful news business out of the gap between the rigid beats of education, science and business, about inventions arising from academic research that became the seeds for new businesses. I had no competition from newspapers for a decade!

Finally, Bugeja completely misreads the quotation from David Miller, starting by ignoring this central sentence: ?But perhaps newspapers are now structured on promises of value, such as independence and objectivity, which fail to substantially exist in the minds of consumers.?

Bugeja then quotes E.W. Scripps in opposition to Miller, when they?re clearly saying the same thing: quality first, then revenue. If the reader does not perceive the quality (independence and objectivity, to name two aspects), is it because the consumer?s vision is faulty (it?s really there); or because it?s no longer there (the newspapers started failing to deliver ? which according to my timeline must have started decades ago). Or because the reader no longer values those things they ought to continue to value?

One of the lessons from ?The Innovator?s Dilemma? is as brutal as anything Bugeja fears: businesses or industries who fail to note the changes in what customers want, but keep improving their product in the ways it always used to draw customers, will fail. As much as I believe that the foundation for a democracy is an informed citizenry, and that that is the sacred duty of the press, philosophical or moral imperatives do not have the force they may once have had. A Harvard study released in July 2007 found that 60% of teens pay little attention to the news; up to age 30, 48% are inattentive to daily news.

What does Bugeja propose to do about that?
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Bugeja responds below.
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Odza gives me a reading list on consultants when he should read the bibliographies of my two recent books, "Interpersonal Divide" and "Living Ethics" (Oxford Univ. Press), which will give him a fuller picture of my research and how it is supported by scholarship and empirical data--hard to incorporate in 1500 words.

Here's a pull quote: Technology changes everything it touches without being changed itself. Media technology incorporates motives in the interface or application that are pegged to profits, not truth, and we're entering an era now in which profit is so consolidated in the hands of a select few that we must invent new terms above "media mogul": Comic Book Antihero and 007 Nemesis.

Fact: A great industry that held government accountable has been harmed, perhaps irreparably, by a handful of people who focused more on future revenue than on past standards.

Speaking of which, Odza ends his response with a question to me: "A Harvard study released in July 2007 found that 60% of teens pay little attention to the news; up to age 30, 48% are inattentive to daily news. What does Bugeja propose to do about that?"

I'm thinking class action suit against venders of consumer technology whose interfaces and applications rely on university wireless distribution systems that have so distracted our youth, especially college age, that they carry the largest debt load in history. Why don't many reading this know the student loan scandal is wrapped up in this? Because it is an investigation you can only get on-site and not from the luxury of sitting in front of a computer terminal.

My zeal tracks back to The Washington Post during Watergate. I cannot imagine Al Lewis checking arrests online; Bernstein, arraignments there; and Woodward, finding Mark Felt at deepthroat@hotmail.com.