Advice from retired editors
A friend expressed disappointment that I did not attend the Gene Roberts speech at the Friends of the Library event at UNCG last week. My response surprised and, I suspect, disappointed him even more: "I have heard enough retired editors talk about the good old days and how we should fix newspapers to last a lifetime."
I meant no disrespect to Roberts, one of the three or four most significant newspaper editors of the past 50 years. He has one heckuva story and deserves all the honors he gets. He was here to talk about his book with Hank Klibanoff, The Race Beat, which I have read and admire. Not only are there good journalism stories in it, but there are good hero stories in it. But I read and talk with retired editors and reporters who describe the solution to newspaper problems as a return to the good old days when the daily paper was the only game in town.
From what I hear, Roberts also bemoaned the contraction of newsrooms and of international reporting. I agree. How can you not? Doubling the size of reporting staffs would certainly serve the community. The more journalists reporting the good, the bad and the ugly, the better.
But those are the effects of problems facing newspapers not the cause. While good journalism has not changed markedly since the 1990s, technology has. So has the audience. So have people's habits. Not addressing those changes in discussions about journalism and newspapers is like talking about television as if there were still only three channels.
Those changes:
* the economic distress faced by traditional newspaper advertisers such as department stores
* the loss of classifieds revenues
* the splintering of the attentions and interests of the audience
* the ability to get news and information from thousands of other places and in dozens of other ways
* the sluggishness with which newspapers have anticipated the future (now present) and the sluggishness of their response
These won't be fixed by reducing the profit margin or going back to the journalistic world of the 1980s and 90s. They will be addressed by innovation, peering around corners and going to where the people are. And producing great journalism.
Steve Yelvington uses a telling, humbling anecdote from a trip to Thailand to make the same point: We can sit and bemoan the passing of the era of the great metropolitan newspaper or we can choose to look for ways to invent the future. I think journalism will be changed, but it's going to survive.
I would go further. By inventing the future, journalism will be stronger. It just won't be entirely in newspaper form.