Why Newspapers Are Dying

by Dennis Green

There is much speculation about the future of newspapers on newsprint. Much agonizing about the Internet, and “monetizing,” making a profit, and the high expense of maintaining a powerful, professional newsroom, not just printing the thing on paper and tossing it on your doorstep.

One of our San Francisco Bay Area metropolitan dailies, the San Francisco Chronicle, has been making changes in its design, production and format to try and better compete. They even have a whole new section called “Movies” that comes out once a week, but we all know that only about three movies a year that are worth seeing get made. And they all miss the major weakness in major dailies…

Content. The inclusion of stories, features and op-ed pieces that are intriguing, interesting enough that I want to read them. That’s more than a matter simply of taste, but also of being hip to the popular imagination, even the zeitgeist. With all those sections, and all those pieces of writing in each section, are any of them readable? Not just inviting, but do they deliver?

I have a Kindle, and for several months, I subscribed on it to both the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times, getting new editions overnight, on the Amazon Kindle wireless network, Whispernet, for a fraction of the cost of a home-delivered hard copy. In the Kindle format, you can find a table of contents and jump to any story, or scan through the publications in their printed layout and sequencing.

Very shortly, I found that I was simply not interested in most of the content of either newspaper. Many of them, especially the wire service stories, were re-hashes of reports I’d seen on TV news the night before, or the predictable, even clichéd items everyone was talking about. I could scan thirty pages in eight minutes or less. Soon, I found myself jumping to the op-ed sections, where at least some creativity was in evidence.

But even there, I discovered that there was very little original or compelling intellectual creativity going on. I began to tell myself I was just being too particular, expecting too much. After all, I decided long ago that most of my time is much better spent writing than in reading. I’ve already read my ten billion words, those hundreds of novels and poetry anthologies and books of non-fiction, thank you very much.

But there it was. I was reading only three or four articles a day from these newspaper subscriptions, max. So I cancelled them, very easy to do on the Kindle, and putting no delivery boys out of work. I use it now, the e-book, only for books I really want to savor, to be able to read in tandem on my iPhone, to pick up and put down any time I want.

But in the process, I also learned something about newspapers that I might not have perceived from just picking up the Sunday rag. I learned that the editors, for the most part, aren’t doing their job, haven’t got a clue what appeals to most intelligent readers, and that, more than technology, is bringing about the demise of the genre as a powerful societal and economic force.

I’ve worked as a journalist myself for many years, was an editor-in- chief for five years in the ‘70s, had a column in one of the Alameda newspapers for five years, and have maintained many blogs, including an online version of this column, EdgeCity. I’ve had to think about what will capture a reader’s attention, hold his interest past the lead-in, have him coming back for more. I know what makes for a “good read.”

So what’s going on? Are the newspapers simply outliers of major corporations and captives of corporate-think? Are editors trying too hard to be popular, like some drunk at a party trying to pick up on women? Or are they simply so overwhelmed by the competition from bloggers like the Huffington Post and 24/7 talk TV that they’ve simply lost their bearings?

I don’t know the answer to those questions. The last editor I met with for conversation over coffee was so overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of his workload and the power politics of his publisher that he couldn’t think straight, or give me a straight answer to my most basic questions. I fear he’s typical, and one of the reasons newspapers as we used to know them have already become extinct.

© 2010 Dennis Green