Your points are well-made, Mr. Baldwin. A key, though, is that virtually no one, at The Ledger or any other newspaper with which I’m familiar, is adamantly opposed to the transformation the industry is going through. Online is almost certainly where news media will ply their trade for the foreseeable future. But online, for newspapers, isn’t there yet. It’s not even close, in most cases. Newspapers are bumbling in a dark e-room, stubbing their toes on end tables and basically getting blogged down. They’re trying to recreate the sheer newspaper experience for the Right-Click Generation, and it’s not working. Revenue from newspapers’ online incarnations accounts for a very small percentage of the overall revenue that makes stockholders tingle with pleasure. This is understandable: It’s a difficult transition, a strange new world, a wild frontier, yada yada.
So here’s the problem: Many of the same newspapers whose online entities generate little cash are nonetheless putting all their eggs into that e-basket. They’re cannibalizing the newspaper staff — at least the staff they haven’t laid off — to power the online product. It’s coming at the expense of the newspaper proper — which is the main revenue source, by far, for almost every media company that owns newspapers. Management might tout 10,000 hits on a particular story online, for which the users pay exactly nothing. Meanwhile, the same story in the daily newspaper is seen by often five, 10, 20 times as many people, and these customers pay for the privilege. That brings in lots of pretty silver and gold for the bean-counters to dangle in front of management — which then pours the money into the online product and lays off a few more from the newspaper staff. Subscribers, meanwhile, see content getting leaner, less comprehensive, sloppier, as staff, space and accuracy disappear. So subscribers start calling in that ugly word: cancel. Management then uses the decline in subscribers to justify its rabid focus on online content, which continues to bring in pennies compared to the dollars attracted by that creaky dinosaur, the newspaper.
So here’s my long-winded point. This is the transitional period. Right now. We’re in the midst of the slow demise of the traditional newspaper, printed on lovely-smelling pulp and delivered by yawning teenagers every morning right to your door, or at least to the spider-infested bushes next to your door. And we’re in the midst of the slow ascension of online news. Fine. But for every newspaper-slash-online news entity I’m aware of, online is still the parasite. It is the newspaper that is the host, that pays the bills. That will change, but for now, that’s the reality. So why not treat both entities with respect and work to keep both healthy until the baton can be safely passed?
That’s the missing link here. It’s like that Darwinian chart of the evolution of Man, except we suddenly jump from an eager beat reporter with a pad, pen and onion breath — to the Borg, those robotic “Star Trek” goons who are more machine than biological being, who absorb and destroy that which a more natural evolution had carefully created. The missing link is us — Newspaperus Erectus, willing to work toward an online reality that expands and enhances what newspapers have done, often superbly, for merely a few centuries. But not at the expense of those newspapers that have been an integral part of this nation since its infancy.
What’s happening at The Ledger, and at so many dailies nationally, is that the rush to join the online flow isn’t tempered with the recognition that good, old-fashioned reporting and editing will be no less important on the Net than it has been on pulp paper. The Ledger is cutting off its head to spite its mouse, or something. By gutting the newspaper staff — a slow, ugly form of public hari-kiri — The Ledger is crippling its ability to create an online entity that will have the excellence and depth to stand out in a busy, busy, busy cyberworld. Sorry, weary paperboy: The “newspaper” of the future will be dropped not into petunias but right into living rooms, right there on laptap screens, gosh whizbam wow … but at the rate The Ledger is going, there will be little worth reading. Meanwhile, many first-rate journalists and the newspaper they’ve served so well are seen as expendable, casualties of war, surplus cargo to be jettisoned.
What so many of us veteran newspaperfolk want is only that newspapers should be allowed to die with dignity. They’re an inextricable part of what America has been and is: from Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” pamphlet to Ben Franklin’s searing editorial cartoon of a sliced-up snake and its “Join … Or Die” slogan aimed at the colonies, through one “civil” war and two world wars, to the Hindenburg belching fire, to a triumphant Truman holding up the Chicago Daily Tribune (can you see him holding aloft his iPhone headline of “Dewey Defeats Truman”?), to gut-punching images from Vietnam and assassinations of two Kennedys and a King, to the dogged investigative work of a couple of no-name reporters for The Washington Post whose stories took down a corrupt president. Contrary to popular belief, newspapers, not YouTube, are what the Founding Fathers were talking about when they wrote freedom of the press into the First Amendment. Newspapers have served this republic nobly, and we can hope that tradition will continue online. But it can’t when the best reporters and editors are castoffs just at a time they’re needed most. Fools run The Ledger, and don’t be surprised if they run it into the ground in a year or two, and that, without a healthy host, the online entity shrivels and dies.
Mr. Baldwin is exactly right: Newspapers, like all media, have to adapt. Adaptation can be a strenuous, painful process. Insiders realize just how important newspapers are to this process; all them megahyped blogs that deliver those “scoops” are using newspaper reports as their springboards. The online pirates pillage any newspapers they can, because newspapers are still the gold standard in our society’s thirst to know what’s happening in our nation. The amazing thing about The Ledger in the last decade is that it has generally been much better than the people who ostensibly run it. The staff has overachieved in an atmosphere of criticism, cronyism, instability, insincerity, bullying, tight-sphincterism and, gotta love ‘em, “beg memos,” upper management’s answer to waterboarding. But this latest round of throat-cuttings may have bled the patient a little too much. I hear nothing but stunned confusion from remaining Ledger staff in regard to the shining new path management has laid out. Departing staff members are being told by colleagues that they’re the lucky ones. Time will tell, but I know who I’d bet on. Ledger management is a bunch of losers, but the real losers will be not just the ever-declining number of staff, readers and advertisers; it will be the valiant legacy of newspapers themselves.
