End of an Era, or Restoration of a Free Press?

Howard Kurtz:

The journalism business is suffering from a double-barreled depression that stretches far beyond the travails of a single paper. If the industry were a person, a shrink would prescribe Prozac.

Meanwhile, advertisers are boosting internet advertising. If I owned a newspaper, I'd be worried too.

Here's what I'd do. Cut all the highly-paid showboats, and hire a bunch of young people who haven't been contaminated by Journalism Schools. Train them from the bottom up. Do it now, while there are some of the old timers around who had to learn their craft on the job. Go out of your way to find reporters with political positions different from the mainstream in New York City, who represent all the demographic groups you can find. Quit trying to tell everybody what to think and just stick to facts. Add comments to the Wire Service stories you use, to give a little more balance. The WaPo online has begun to do this, featuring quotes from bloggers, who don't generally ask to be paid. A link makes most of them happy. The problem with the news is that it is packaged and delivered by a group of elites who write for each other rather than for the populace. There's plenty of questioning of politicians they don't like, but generally the press acts and sounds like the left wing of the Democrat Party. The reason that Rush Limbaugh became rich was because he and Roger Ailes saw an unserved market for political commentary and started serving it. That's why Air America is foundering, it's market is already served by three major broadcast networks and every big paper except the Wall St. Journal.

I think that even if they do all this, most newspapers will have to quit publishing on newsprint and begin publishing online exclusively. They'll have to find some way to make people pay for their content, since there is no longer any need to read local papers for national news. You can get it all from Yahoo!. What people will pay for is business and investing news. Who knows whether people will support the NYTimes Op-Ed lineup? I can't believe that anybody thinks the drivel put out by Kruman, Dowd, Herbert, et al. is worth $50 a year. Time will tell.

This change, whatever it is, is likely to make printing news on paper a losing proposition. Broadcasting will continue. The internet will grow. Will we see a day when publishers start giving away laptops and internet connections with a subscription? Who knows?

One think is certain, the uniformity in media slant that has existed all of my life and has hardened into
an almost admitted bias toward the Democrat Party will no longer hold sway. Free speech is returning to mass communications. Someday we may even see a day when the favor of the MSM won't be worth any points in a national election.