Technology and Society
No News Would Be Bad News
June 28, 2016
There’s a new State of the News Media report out (finally!) and, while I’m used to celebrating its arrival in March, it’s always worth waiting for – not because the news is good, it’s not. But it’s a way of checking up on an industry that matters. I know that trashing the media is all the rage, but I am an incurable romantic when it comes to the value of good reporting and the values that underlie it.
The recession isn’t over for newspapers, my news source of choice. Though newsrooms aren’t hemorrhaging jobs quite as drastically as past years, things aren’t good. There are 33,000 reporters and editors at work now – 20,000 fewer than there were merely two decades ago. Cable and network news is doing better financially, though (I would argue) not in terms of actual news value. Wall-to-wall hyperactive election coverage for months and months, particularly when one candidate is a professional television personality, brings in advertising and viewers, though it makes me want to finally cut the cord, just as nuisance campaign calls led to us ditching our landline years ago. I’m not alone. The report suggests that cords are being cut more frequently, particularly by young viewers, so television news is soon going to be facing the very challenges that newspapers have been wrestling with for years. How do you pay for news gathering when the way you paid the bills and delivered the goods no longer works? And why, when the industry is so troubled, do we keep seeing so much consolidation? Newspapers must be worth something if speculators keep buying them – or is it just the kind of peculiar speculation that made so many folks rich through bundling and reselling the debt on desperate people’s homes?
The Sunday New York Times comes to my door the old-fashioned way, with a thump, and the digital version comes to my phone, but it’s far from my main news source. A huge percentage of the news stories I read – even those published by the Times – come to me through my Twitter connections. (I don’t use Facebook, but it’s another major site for people’s news habits, and so important to news organizations that they have cut deals to publish inside Facebook, even though they cede some control and have to share ad revenue.) It’s a little mysterious to me why I prefer the folks who I follow to be my news editors, but my habits suggest that I do. It’s partly professional connections – a story that a fellow librarian or academic finds interesting may also fall into my range of interests – but I’ve also chosen certain reporters to follow because they cover beats I care about. Since I follow folks in a number of countries, I get more world coverage than I can get from the Times (though, admittedly, my Twitter feed is biased toward English-speaking nations, so Britain, Canada, and Australia loom disproportionately large). An even stronger motivation to read while on Twitter: when I see a story that I think is impor