Why We Must Shift Our Attention from “Save Newspapers” to “Save Society”

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For a long time, longer than anyone in the newspaper business has been alive, in fact, print journalism has been intertwined with these economics. The expense of printing created an environment where Wal-Mart was willing to subsidize the Baghdad bureau. This wasn’t because of any deep link between advertising and reporting, nor was it about any real desire on the part of Wal-Mart to have its marketing budget go to international correspondents. It was just an accident. Advertisers had little choice other than to have their money used that way, since they didn’t really have any other vehicle for display ads.

The competition-deflecting effects of printing cost got destroyed by the Internet, where everyone pays for the infrastructure, and then everyone gets to use it. And when Wal-Mart, and the local Maytag dealer, and the law firm hiring a secretary, and that kid down the block selling his bike, were all able to use that infrastructure to get out of their old relationship with the publisher, they did. They’d never really signed up to fund the Baghdad bureau anyway.

People in the newspaper business often note that their labor benefits society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “you’re gonna miss us when we’re gone” has never been much of a business model.

It’s true that the print media do much of society’s heavy journalistic lifting, from teasing out every angle of a huge story to the grind of attending the city council meeting, in case something happens. This coverage is beneficial even for people who aren’t newspaper readers, because the work of print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to district attorneys to talk radio hosts to bloggers.

So who will cover that city council meeting when the newspaper reporter on that beat loses her job?

I don’t know. Nobody knows. The Internet turns 40 this fall. Public access is less than half that age. Web use, as a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world, is less than half that age. We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.

Imagine, in 1996, asking some Net-savvy soul to expound on the potential of craigslist, then just a year old and not yet incorporated. The answer you’d almost certainly have gotten would be extrapolation: “Mailing lists can be powerful tools,” “Social effects are intertwining with digital networks,” etc. What no one would have told you, could have told you, was what actually happened: Craiglist became a critical piece of infrastructure. Not the idea of craigslist, or the business model, or even the software driving it. Craigslist itself spread to cover hundreds of cities and has become a part of public consciousness about what is now possible. Only in retrospect are experiments revealed to be turning points.

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly bound together as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism.

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