Stupid is as stupid does
I had been working on a post about Jack Shafer's column in which he asserts that when The New York Times comes into a market, the local newspaper responds by becoming more local and therefore dumbs down.
Now I don't need to finish it. Thank goodness, too. Jeff Jarvis said it all better than I did. Shafer assumes that local is dumb, which is to say that national and foreign is smart. That is a coastal prejudice: What happens in Washington, New York, and maybe once a month in L.A. is important and everything in between, in the flyover, is just dumb.
Shafer is also revealing his assumption about journalism: that the big, national story is closer to real journalism; the rest is just dumb.
We've been focusing more and more on local news over the past two or three years, and as a result, have often been accused of "dumbing down." Best I can tell, that means that whenever we don't have the latest on Iraq or the Middle East or Washington politics on the front page, we're contributing to the ignorance of the populace.
Has nothing to do with the Times. The Times as Wal-Mart analogy isn't even close. In an age of 24/7 television news and many, many cable information niches, when millions of Web sites deliver every speck of detail anyone could want directly into the home and when broadband connections are growing faster than kudzu, why wouldn't a newspaper want to specialize in what it knows best -- its own community?
Or, as Jarvis says: In any case, it would be a terrible business model to keep wasting paper and staff on the stories you can get not only in The Times but also online and on cable.
You can read our paper and get a healthy dose of things that happened in Guilford County yesterday and things to do in Guilford County today and tomorrow. You can also get a taste of news from around the world. We can't be all things to all people any longer. Too many choices are out there.
I know that many people don't care what the City Council does or what the school board does. They don't care about crime in low-income areas or knowing that airfares are high at PTI. Or even that both the Girls Gone Wild and Jeopardy visited Greensboro in the same week. But a lot of people do. It's all a part of being engaged in what's going on in your community. Community extends around the world, too, which is why we still have national and world news in the paper. But it's not what we can do best and it's not our focus.
I'll let Jarvis deal with the silliest assertion: Finally, the study notes that when The Times' trucks invade, the readership in the educated zipcodes decreases -- but the readership in other (read: dumber) zip codes increases. Their assumption is that the papers got dumber. No, the papers may have just gotten more useful; they may have gotten rid of the often boring, commodity news that the editors think is important but the people don't.
Maybe the local papers didn't lose the smart people. Maybe they lost the people who didn't care about local anyway. Or maybe they lost the snots. Or Yankees fans.
Comments (2)
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I wouldn't work for a local paper if I thought local news was dumb. The idea that all news that is local is dumb is itself dumb.
But I do appreciate the sentiment that people who ignore national and international news because they don't care about anything that isn't local are, at the very least, doing something that is dumb.
It's important to know what's going on in your community - but shrugging off what's going on nationally or internationally because you don't need to know (because after all that's what the main stream media wants you to know...they only pay attention to the coasts and don't care about what they so smugly term "fly over America")...that isn't a different perspective. That's dumb.
"Fly-over" is one of knee jerk political terms at which I usually roll my eyes. Through sheer force of will and repition of use it's wormed its way into everyday speech, but it's so transparently...well, dumb...we should all just stop using it. National media outlets cover New York, California and Washington because they're the centers of commerce, politics and culture (or perhaps more accurately entertainment) and therefore news from those areas impacts the lives of more people more directly than news from Iowa or New Jersey (which are both lovely places once you get to know them). There isn't a disproptionate amount of coverage in those places...there's the appropriate amount of coverage among media that positions itself nationally (The New York Times, CNN, The networks, etc). Coverage of these areas is not "commodity news" to everyone else - though I do agree you can get it in other places. It's not what Jarvis says that turns me off -- it's the way he says it.
As Jarvis says, better local papers are proud of being good at covering their towns better than those people could - and smart readers/viewers know the difference.
But both Schaffer and Jarvis are making dumb arguments - or making good points in a way that is dumb. There's so much reverse-classism in Jarvis' piece that it almost seems like something you'd see on the Colbert Report. Maybe they just got rid of the snots and Yankee fans? Yeah! And the French too! And anyone who went to an Ivy League school!
Gimme a break.
Both these guys could make sound points about media without sounding like class warrior windbags.
Posted on July 29, 2006 2:34 PM
Local news would be worthy of my time if it would cover things that actually impact me. Instead, we get a horror parade of the daily body count mixed with asinine comments and a weather forcast that is no better than you could get anytime you wanted off the internet. Local news simply provides no value, and it is without a doubt the very first Reality TV Series in television history. Its all about ratings.
Posted on February 19, 2007 11:55 PM